


Regency

by trinity_destler



Category: NCIS
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Character Study: Anthony DiNozzo, Episode: s03e24 Hiatus Part II, Episode: s04e03 Singled Out, Family, Friendship, Gen, Hiatus Feels, Season 3/4, Team Feels, Tony Feels, chain of command
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 17:03:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/664359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinity_destler/pseuds/trinity_destler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gibbs leaves, Tony leads, and it isn't at all like they expected. Gibbs comes back and nothing is as different as that which is the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. McGee

1\. McGee

.

He trudged the whole way from the elevator to his desk without looking up from the floor.

The carpet was slightly threadbare beneath the cubicle partitions and worn in a fairly neat path between the desks. If this were a crime scene he would be making summations about the mental state of the office's occupants, citing clear evidence they paced far more than could be considered healthy.

He stopped his eyes from following the pattern upward to take in the rest of the room as he neared his desk. Looking up would mean seeing what was not there. Looking up would mean remembering _why_ it was not there. He couldn't face that scene again, even in his own mind, not until he had had time to make up a pros-and-cons assessment of the current situation and chart himself into complacency. He could update the flow chart of his career while he was at it, a nice thick black line dipping off the bottom edge of the page into nothingness.

He reached his work station, his back to the silence of the squad-room. He had just put down his coffee and bagel when he realised that not canvassing his surroundings had been a tactical misstep.

"Hey, McGee."

Jumpy with tension, he pivoted too quickly to face that deceptively easy, neutral greeting and- shocked by what he saw- nearly overbalanced. He tried not to make a spectacle of himself as he staggered for equilibrium and gaped, fish-like at the sight before him, but it was a losing battle.

Tony was sitting at Gibbs' desk.

Paperwork was strewn about him in an unfathomable mess, which no doubt made perfect sense in what passed for the DiNozzo mind. He looked utterly calm; his person was neat but relaxed, his posture erect but casual, and he was groomed within an inch of his life. McGee may not have known much about fashion, but he knew a ludicrously expensive, hand-tailored suit and a fifty dollar haircut when he saw one. The overcompensation was more than a little worrying, but what truly disquieted him was the way that Tony was looking up at him as if nothing could possibly be more boringly normal, more mundane and commonplace than his sitting in that verboten chair.

His eyes sliding away from Tony's disturbingly mild expression to follow the line of his shoulder down his arm to the surface of the desk, McGee noticed- with a terrible feeling of impending doom- that a Mighty Mouse stapler now occupied the place where Gibbs' Swingline had once lived.

"Hey, Tony," he said, the timbre of his voice only slightly elevated.

"Trying to get ship shape around here, so to speak..." Tony seemed vaguely unnerved by his own choice of words, staring a moment into the middle distance. He shook off the reverie, but the facsimile of his usual energy injected into his next words was not quite convincing, "Ready for your close-up?"

At McGee's bemused nod, Tony ran the end of his pen along a line of type in the report he held, his manner abruptly business-like, "When were your last physical aptitude and firearms proficiency exams?"

McGee wondered if he was in hospital and this was his brain's idea of a fever dream. It would make more sense than the alternative. That last night was real, that this was real. "Couple months ago, why?"

Tony's grey-green eyes shone almost jade under the glare of the desk lamp, but he only looked up for a split second before they were shaded by his eyelashes. "Gotta pass the full monty on Friday or they can't take you off probationary status for a special circumstances promotion. I'll run some drills with you tomorrow if I have time, but I booked the firing range for sure 0700 on Wednesday, be here by six."

There were few things he had expected less than this. The fact that his sometime mentor, frequent tormentor was speaking to him in the civilised, respectful tone which he usually reserved for the Director was totally secondary to the fact that he had not been called anything but his name throughout this conversation. In McGee's experience, Tony only completely cut the shit under very specific circumstances: something very bad had happened, was happening, or would happen shortly.

"What?" it was all he could manage at the moment.

"They're pretty brutal with probies bumped up before their time and you're slow on the draw with your right hand. I know you can't fire six times in six seconds. They'll nail you on that, flexibility, sprinting speed, and endurance. Your form could use some confidence overall, but that's not going to make or break you, they'll figure I can handle that." Somehow, Tony was able to give this criticism without the slightest hint of insult in his voice. This was particularly remarkable given he could usually make observations about the weather sound like grounds for a blood feud. "And I'm going to teach you to track cover better. They barely scratch the surface at FLETC."

"They do it better at the Police Academy?" McGee tried to keep from sounding incredulous, but Tony's incongruous behaviour and that nagging (he could admit, slightly self-important) scepticism he could never control around DiNozzo made it difficult.

"No, that's about the same," Tony granted, his voice even and no trace of irritation in his face, "but they do at Rhode Island Military Academy."

McGee stared openly. Tony's eyes stayed on the page in front of him, his hands spread placidly against the desk. There was a brief stand-off of mutually feigned calm before McGee decided to leave that perspective-shattering bombshell the hell alone and face what they were carefully not saying.

"Gibbs isn't coming back, is he?"

"What gave you that idea, Probie! His ridiculous macho bullshit passing of the torch, his list of meaningless platitudes or his dropping that tired catch-phrase he's spectacularly failing to live up to?" Tony raised his voice so rarely that this sudden, vicious outburst rendered him almost totally alien to the junior agent. He caught himself off McGee's wide-eyed paralysis as he stopped for breath and he visibly reigned in his vitriol, one hand rising to cover his eyes. He sighed and there was a bone weariness in the sound, a note of defeat disconcertingly out of character for him. "Sorry, kid, it's not your fault."

Knowing it wasn't the time or the place, but not particularly caring, McGee felt his hackles rise. "I'm not a kid, DiNozzo." Maybe he was the last time he'd received that apology from Tony, the last time their world had been shattered, but he'd seen too much in the intervening year since then to be called one now.

Tony stood from behind the desk, for once not slouching, or leaning, or hunching, and McGee remembered for the first time in a long time what a big man the senior agent really was. He refused to shrink back from the unexpected physical intimidation, something he was used to from Gibbs, but which he now realised in contrast that Tony had almost always avoided before, even with suspects. Standing straight long enough to see McGee bristle slightly, Tony then leaned across the desk, his eyes sharp, appraising, "How long have you been in law enforcement, McGee?"

"Four years," McGee said firmly, proud and not backing down.

"Mmhmm," DiNozzo crossed his arms over his chest deliberately, calling attention to their difference in build, "I've been in for twelve."

Lifting his chin, McGee met the stony expression on Tony's face with one of his own, "I know I'm here to learn from you, I know I'm still green, but that doesn't mean that I don't deserve respect."

"Do you know that, Probie?" Tony shook his head as if confused, "I mean, I wonder sometimes, do you really know that? I seem to recall myself always acknowledging that I can't do what you do, but I don't remember that going the other way. Am I forgetting something?"

McGee's mouth opened, but he thought better of tossing out a quick retort. His point stood, but he also couldn't really argue with that. The fact was, it was on both of them, though he did have to maintain that Tony started it. Tony set off razing him the day they met and he'd consequently mistrusted nearly every interaction they'd had since, frequently to the point that McGee suspected real praise, ignored genuine admiration, and failed to notice the respect he had earned. He was a civilian, unused to the parlance that they, the veterans, seemed so instinctively to understand. Uncomfortable with hazing as a training tool after too many years of petty, objectless bullying. He knew this, intellectually, but day-to-day he couldn't prevent it from getting to him and sometimes he found himself lashing out in retaliation disproportionate to the crime. He'd never said a wholly positive word about Tony's uncanny, unconventional talents and the reverse was certainly not true, now that he thought about it.

It didn't make it right, it didn't mean he should _have to_ learn to differentiate between Tony's smokescreen of obnoxiousness and when he really meant something, but this was probably the worst possible moment to call him on that particular character flaw. They all needed their coping methods.

Nodding at McGee's thoughtful expression, probably thinking he'd won that round, Tony sat back down. "This isn't play-pretend any more, I am all you've got and you need to accept that."

McGee brushed the ultimatum aside for the moment, unprepared for it and first needing to regain a foothold on reality, "You really went to military school?"

Tony made a dismissive gesture, accepting the non-sequitur without pressing the issue, "I really did."

"And the Director is putting you in charge of the MCRT with just me and Ziva?" he couldn't help how unbelievable it sounded.

"She gave me one week off active duty and three 'soft' cases to assess your fitness and make whatever adjustments; then, if she thinks we're up to par, we'll be back on high rotation."

"You're going to assess our fitness?" McGee found himself imagining this would involve bar hopping and movie trivia more than draw speed drills and tactics.

Tony's expression was flinty, though his tone remained light, "Yes, Agent McGee, I am your commanding officer. I've been your immediate superior and primarily responsible for keeping your hide on this side of the dirt for three years now, no one knows your weaknesses better than me. No, not even him. You are an invaluable resource to this agency, you have skills I don't even understand, but you are miles away from where you need to be to do my job. Reality check? It's about survival first and science second. You're here because you had goods to give and you didn't let us bully you and I respect that, but I don't outrank you by accident. It's because I'm better at this than you. Are we clear?"

McGee didn't really mean it like that. He thought he didn't anyway, things always seemed to come out wrong for him and it was a pretty feeble joke given the context of the conversation and the apparent thinness of Tony's patience. So he nodded without argument, "Sure thing." He'd say something about ego trips and not-being-Gibbs when they weren't all riding on their last nerve.

Tony grimaced, seemingly pained by McGee's non-confrontational reaction. "It'd all be so much easier if Kate were here."

The name hung heavily on the air between the two men. They didn't talk about her, they didn't wonder what she would have thought or said or done. They tried desperately not to know how different things would be if she were still with them. They tried to pretend to each other that they didn't miss her, that her shade didn't haunt the features of every female victim they processed, they tried to pretend McGee didn't still sometimes see blood and tears streaked on Tony's face. He tried to pretend he didn't still feel that warm spray.

McGee stumbled for something to say to break the spell, "H-how so?"

"C'mon, Probie," a muscle leapt in Tony's cheek at the second slip in formality, but he pushed on, "You're being bumped from G1 to NASCAR in one day. If she were here..."

"What?"

His angular features were sharply shadowed by the single light source of the desk lamp, his distant expression rendered starkly dramatic, and McGee suddenly felt as though he were in an old movie. The way Tony's eyes glittered, he wished there _were_ a cinema screen separating them. "But she's not. And Ziva can't be my second because she's Mossad... among other things. It's tricky her even being here, never mind wielding sovereign power over American agents. It's gotta be you, McGee, and given a recommendation from your commanding officer and some extenuating circumstances, ta da, you're a senior agent." Tony flashed a grin, but it was a poor thing.

"You don't seem happy."

A surge of insecurity rose in Tim along with the words, bubbling out before he could stop them. The old doubts about whether he was really cut out for this sort of insanity given his utterly pedestrian background and how it stacked up (or rather, didn't) with those of his team-mates. His perfect test scores repeatedly failing to transfer into perfect reactions out in the field. Did Tony see whatever Gibbs had seen in him? Did he think Tim was ready for this challenge or was he just trying to salvage a broken team and keep their ramshackle family together? Was he just in it for the promotion? McGee had spent so much time trying to one-up, ignore or dismiss his senior agent, he realised he had no idea where Tony stood on anything.

Tony had studied him levelly during this little panic attack, his index finger under his bottom lip. Finally, he shrugged as if in dismissal, but his voice was both serious and sincere as he answered, "It's not exactly how I imagined awarding you this promotion, Tim."

That brought it home like nothing else had yet. This was it, this was really happening; everything _had_ changed. This wasn't some crisis-situation they'd resolve in a few hours, this was it. Gibbs was gone and _Tony_ was his number one, the law, subject to scrutiny only from the Director. He realised two things: he had learned more about his superior in the last five minutes than in two years, and that being under his command would not be at all like he expected.

"How did you?"

A smile, small and genuine, "I imagined watching you earn it first."

In a fleeting moment of unprecedented understanding, Tim returned the smile, his bright green eyes shining.

"Thanks, boss."

Something dear and irreplaceable had been lost yesterday, but maybe they'd be okay.


	2. Ziva

2\. Ziva

.

They were still grinning at each other over Gibbs' desk when the soft ding of the elevator announced another arrival.

Ziva entered the equation with her personal shields on maximum. Her hair was pulled back into a tightly braided coil at the crown of her head and every inch of her skin possible was concealed beneath a black turtle neck and long dress slacks. She had sacrificed ease of mobility in order to close the height gap between herself and her male colleagues at least a little and the four inch pumps she'd selected were also capable of making a satisfyingly menacing sound as she walked. Make-up hid the slight pallor of her face and distracted from the redness around her eyes. Half her belongings were already packed and labelled for shipment to Tel Aviv. The other half was still neatly arranged in her living space, ready to be used.

Ziva did not believe in being disappointed.

She scanned the squad room surreptitiously as she came silently around the corner. An official debriefing was clearly taking place in some conference room elsewhere in the building to address the catastrophe (or one of them) of the night before. Tony and McGee were the only agents on the floor, Gibbs' harshly bright LED desk lamp the only illumination in the early morning dim of the cavernous room. She assessed the two men, noting dress and body language before facial expressions.

Ziva did not believe in being unprepared.

As she studied them, she was suddenly unspeakably grateful for McGee's vulnerable cuteness, for Tony's dazzling movie-star good looks and the accompanying foppish immaturity. They were men she could classify as potential lovers, men she could bring herself to manipulate if she needed to, to control. They were flawed and insecure, their hearts on their sleeves and their awareness of that fact nearly non-existent. To have to face one more authoritarian father figure poised to abandon her would have been the final death of her professional composure. Thank the Most High the Director was a woman and Ducky still had a touch of the child in him. She could mother these men or date them and as long as they remained naïve, she would always have the upper hand.

She did believe in doing what was necessary to ensure her survival.

Tony turned to look at her as she rounded her desk to sit down, his eyes were clear, but his mouth turned slightly down in what she might call a calculating expression on another man. McGee followed his gaze and noticed her for the first time. She offered them both a small, hopeful smile.

"Don't worry, Officer David, they haven't disbanded us yet." Tony circled the office to lean on her desk and flash her his usual roguish half-grin even as he called out her uncertainty, but the unusually low pitch of his voice revealed the strain he otherwise so completely concealed. She surmised he had been here most of the night and, judging by the serious tone of his words, that he was still a bit locked up in all-business mode. What had he been thinking about all these hours, what decisions had he made outside of her ability to observe and influence?

She watched his left hand reflexively opening and closing, wondering if familiarity were dulling her edge or if he was more observant than she had thought, "Then I am still employed in Washington, yes?"

"You work for me now." His fist closed tightly and remained closed.

McGee shook his head, trying for sardonic but looking flighty and dishevelled, "Why does that sound like a threat?"

She looked between them, feeling as if a trap were closing in, "That is it? They are not breaking up the team for assessment and reconstruction?" It couldn't be so easy. Would Jenny really sign off on someone like Tony as her agency centre piece? How could she be sure they were not more loyal to their original controller than to the organisation? Mossad would never allow such an oversight, even hypothetically.

"Nope." Tony sat on the edge of her desk, "Clean succession. Crown prince takes the throne. You guys want pizza at the coronation?"

McGee put a hand on his stomach and made a face, "For breakfast, Tony?"

A grin. "Of course. You two need to keep your strength up, I want your reports on my desk and your backs to the building by 1700."

Glances were exchanged. They knew this was a cover up situation; if memories could be cut out of the brain, they'd all be under the knife by now.

"Is anyone going to read our reports?"

"Sure," Tony pushed away from Ziva's desk, his tone careless, then abruptly steely, "I will."

"And tomorrow?" She liked to know where she stood. Where it all might go from here.

"You and I are going on a little field trip, Zi-vah," he sank into Gibbs' chair and laced his fingers together behind his head. "The state police have an activity day planned for their youngsters and I convinced them that you don't take up much room."

Her eyes narrowed. There were still times when she had no idea what kind of man Tony was, how seriously he took anything. "What kind of activity? Why isn't McGee coming?"

Tony started shifting through his mess of paperwork, apparently unconcerned by the suspicion in her voice, "Field exam for CSI techs and interview tactics for homicide detectives. McGee doesn't need to come, he's got evidence collection procedure tattooed on the inside of his eyelids and he can get a straight answer without causing debilitating pain."

McGee started to preen and her mouth had opened in outrage, but neither got far, because Tony wasn't finished.

"Besides, he's gonna need all the training time he can get to make the grade on his physical aptitude and endurance trials Friday. That's to say nothing of the very special course he's in for next week from Dr. DiNozzo, professor of senior field work." The brand new team leader grinned at the report he was reading as if he could see their stricken faces in it. "T-t-that's all folks. Reports. Get them done before lunch and we can spend the afternoon helping Ziva unpack."

"On it, boss."

"Yes, Tony."

She decided quickly that it was not worth her while to bother being humiliated that he knew she was packed. She could admit that she chronically underestimated his empirical sixth sense, but in her own defence, he hid it perfectly and with illimitable patience until the precise moment it became the ultimate trump card. She would not relish being his opponent in a poker game. He always managed to bluff with the truth.

As she opened up a blank document to begin her report, Ziva decided it was time to do some reassessing of her own. Tony could no longer be classified as safely beneath her, in either the professional or personal sense, but he was also unlike any authority figure she had ever encountered. He had confused her utterly since she had first seen him in action. It was so easy to dismiss him eighty percent of the time, but as soon as you did so he would pull out a stop, become stronger, smarter, faster than you had ever conceived possible. Would bark orders she found herself following before she could realise that this was the same man whom she had just evaluated to be wanting in gravitas next to a cocker-spaniel. The most selfless person she had ever met, but who couldn't share so much as a sandwich. Vain, yet utterly insecure. Oblivious, but more observant than even her fine tuned awareness could match.

His mind worked on a non-humanoid wavelength, one she could not always predict or manipulate, and that made him dangerous.

It would be what it would be, she supposed, and this place was never intended to become her home, these people weren't supposed to be her friends. She had forgotten that under Gibbs, possibly the first man she had ever encountered who had justified a request for her trust with actions worthy of it. It had become a tightrope walk working for a man so like yet unlike her father had been. A man she had foolishly allowed herself to care about, forgetting that every father-figure she had ever had had used her, left her behind or both.

"Wool-gathering is so unlike you, Ziva," Tony's soft voice came from where he crouched at her elbow.

To her great embarrassment, she couldn't suppress a start of surprise. How long had she been staring, unseeing, at her blinking cursor? She turned to shoot him a filthy look.

He smiled up at her, the curve of his lips gentler than she could ever remember seeing before. His eyes rounder, kinder, giving his whole countenance a youthful, hopeful cast. Who was he that he could sometimes show her some side of himself she had never suspected to exist, that he could change his entire bearing like flicking a light switch? She'd worked with some of the greatest undercover agents who had ever lived and none of them surprised her like this.

"You are going to try to be our Gibbs from now on, yes?" she said brusquely, knowing it would erase the concern she wasn't comfortable seeing in his face.

Tony's expression clouded and he seemed to change again, wisdom and bitterness in his stormy green eyes, "I _am_ your team leader from now on. I'm not going to _try_ anything."

The cool, determined strength which bubbled up in him under pressure was of no small interest to her. The potential there intrigued her as much as his usual oafish attitude entertained her. She could not help wondering which was closer to the truth, though she suspected the answer wouldn't be as simple as one or the other.

"You will be competent," she reassured sincerely.

The grin she knew was back now, the transformation sudden and complete. "Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, Zi-vah."

Ziva watched him a little longer in silence, feeling like he was waiting for something.

"I am all right, you know," she said seriously, putting a hand on his shoulder, "You do not need to hold a wiggle over me."

He burst out laughing at that and she became instantly prickly, "What is funny, please?"

Tony coughed out the rest of his chuckles before smiling up at her again, "Vigil, Ziva. It's called a vigil."

"Indeed." She turned back to her computer.

He stood, but leaned close to her, a hand on the back of her chair. "I know that you care and I know you don't want me to, but I'm going to make sure you're okay whether you like it or not. McGallant, too. I don't want your brave faces in this room, to the team you always tell the truth. Deal?"

"I am, as you say, on it, boss."

"Clever girl."

"Hah!" she stabbed a triumphant finger into his chest, "Jurassic Park, yes?"

McGee's head came up from behind his monitor and he raised a quizzical eyebrow at the scene across the office. "Working hard?"

Tony flicked a paper clip and, with uncanny accuracy, it bounced off dead centre of McGee's forehead. "Very important consult, Special Agent McGee, now type or I'm coming over there with my scourge."

McGee rubbed his head, mumbling darkly.

"What's that, maybe-not-so-ex probie?"

"Nothing, boss. I'm getting back to my report now, boss."

Ziva giggled into her hand and turned to her computer with a new conviction that she might be able to handle this after all. Even if she had been abandoned, she was not left alone, and the playboy prince seemed to feel the weight of the crown more heavily on his brow than his sainted predecessor ever did. He was a good leader, might one day be a good friend if she ever decided it was safe to allow that development, and she had enough fathers anyway.


	3. Abby

3\. Abby

.

She shouldn't have been surprised that he knew she would be there, had been there ever since the Unspeakable Event. Tonyish objects always knew where to find you. They put up a smokescreen of obliviousness and you would drop your guard just enough, let slip one or two little fallibilities, and they'd store it all away, deducing four without even needing two plus two. There were times, it had to be acknowledged, when it was less cool and more annoying that she was completely surrounded by highly trained, suspiciously-near-to-psychic federal agents. A girl couldn't get away with anything. She wondered if a tin foil hat would still block their mojo with holes in it for her pigtails.

The Tony who had found her was leaning casually with his elbow and hip against the door-frame of her sanctuary, his hand across his forehead, fingers dangling down in front of his face. He peeked through them at her with a bemused and almost boyish smile.

"So what are the statistics on injury and/or parental abandonment occurring in broom closets?"

She squished Bert to her chest, his fart of protest muffled by her arms, "He didn't abandon us, Tony."

He walked over and slid to the floor beside her, shifting close to tug gently on her left pigtail, which had become frizzy and lopsided during the night. He frowned at the mess, his slim, dextrous fingers picking out the braid and re-plaiting it with quick, economical movements. When he spoke he had that far-away tone of a Tony in distress, "It was an incredibly convincing simulation."

She bumped his knee with hers, feeling herself getting into the upward swing of the cyclic moods she'd been enjoying, "You _know_ Gibbs, you _know_ he'll be back. It's a sure thing."

Tony sighed, rubbing his eyes, "Abby, the Gibbs I thought I knew would never have left."

Her lip quivered, the upward swing just giving her further to fall as she recognised a truth she already knew and had been trying desperately to forget. She was beginning to feel ridiculous about her uncontrollable snivelling, but the tears would not be suppressed, welling up behind the dam of her eyelashes until they could be contained no more. Tony's arms came around her like whipcord and steel, strong enough to fight off even nightmares, and he gathered her close against his chest. She felt very small burrowed into him, a rare commodity for a woman of her not insubstantial height. He was broader than Gibbs, his body harder beneath her cheek and hands; a familiarly solid wall of comfort, but one whose identity could not be made murky by her sorrow even for the barest instant. Tony didn't smell like coffee and fresh sawn boards, but he smelled like home notwithstanding.

She pushed her face into the hollow where his neck met his shoulder and bit back the tears, "Maybe we weren't as understanding as we thought, maybe we just didn't notice..."

"Come on, Abs," his voice was gentle and calm, though with her ear to his chest she could hear the slight hitch in his breathing, feel the tension in his every fibre. Whether he was chiding her or himself, she didn't bother to wonder. "We knew he was never going to retire like we knew he'd thwack me on the head. The man's life's ambition was to die in the line of duty. A Gibbs who could walk away from that is someone I don't know."

"Do you think he'll ever be the same Gibbs again?" her voice sounded small even in her own ears.

Abby listened to the silence that followed her vulnerable whimper with abject misery, knowing he wouldn't want to lie to her, wouldn't want to hurt her, and was having difficulty determining what options that left open to him. She felt him swallowing some emotion, felt his helpless desire to spare the rest of them whatever he was going through. Disillusionment? She was certainly having her fair share. She shifted her position, tracing a circle on the underside of his jaw with her index finger, her vision blurred with tears. It was time someone _else_ spared _him_ once in a while. "Or do you wonder if he ever was?"

"Abby-"

She felt a sudden urgency to seize the present, not to let him question the foundation on which it had been built, "Don't you ever leave me, DiNozzo."

He blinked at this, but he was used to her topical shifts and recovered enough to stare seriously into her eyes.

She thrust a warning finger into his face. "You get problems you come down here to me and I will take care of it. You know I can get rid of anyone who hassles you without leaving a forensic trace, that is _always_ an option, Tony, _I_ am that friend you can call to carry mysterious heavy packages into the garden. I never say stuff until it's too damn late and I'm going to stop regretting it and start doing something about it. I love you a whole lot, I hope you know, and I can't handle another hero BSODing on me. So don't be a hero."

Tony laughed at her squished up face and her colourful support and it was only slightly desperate. It was a start, she thought, and almost felt like she could be okay as long as she could make him laugh. As long as she could find something to laugh about, even if it was just herself.

"It'll be all right." She squeezed one of his hands between both of hers and looked up at him with a shaky smile, seeing her own feelings of being set adrift on rough seas mirrored in his expression. It was funny the metaphor should be so apt, she had always likened his eyes to a stormy ocean; they were a greyish green that almost made navy, but stoutly refused to be blue in decent light. It was rather a good reflection of his inscrutable personality.

"I'm glad you said it and not me," he said and flicked a tense, wistful glance in her direction, "I don't know if I can get any kind of conviction behind that phrase right now."

"You've been leader before, Tony," she told him in her Captain Obvious tone, as if he were silly for having forgotten.

He flicked her arm playfully for that, but quickly sobered as his eyes dropped back down to his hands. "It isn't that. I mean, it isn't just that. McGee and Ziva..."

The idea finally dawned on her through her Gibbs-focused haze that, down a man indefinitely, things would have to change substantially here at home. It wouldn't just be Gibbs' absence, it'd be almost everything. Work loads would have to shift, both the dangerous and the mundane. "McGee's senior field agent because Ziva's just a liaison," she realised aloud.

"Got it in one." Tony leaned his head on her shoulder, his spiky hair brushing her throat, sending shivers down her back. "Care to go for double jeopardy?"

Abby really liked Timmy, in spite of his angry-bovine-in-china-shop idea of subtly in dating and in spite of the resultant fizzling out of their fledgeling relationship before it really existed. She admired his genius, appreciated his awkward chivalry, and he made her laugh (though not always intentionally), but even she knew he was still a bit out of his element. He hadn't been spot-welded back together out of more willpower than flesh after one too many brushes with death and tragedy; like Gibbs was, like Tony who hid it better. McGee wasn't born with his boots on and even after three years wearing them, he still took them off on weekends. She tried to imagine him in Tony's place during some of their previous adventures and felt her heart clench.

"You're worried about him."

"Very."

The weight of the admission pulled them both down the wall into a slump, but Tony started guiltily before they could properly wallow in the anxiety, "I don't mean he can't do it, I-"

Abby hushed him, all sympathy and softness, "No, hun, I totally get it. He's not ready to be you."

"And I'm ready to be Gibbs?" Tony waved off her protests, looking older than he had the night before, his frown practically a grimace. "Truth be told, he'd probably be way better off in a specialised task force. Cyber crime or tech for an SRT. It was good for him, being here, as long as I could have his back, but now he'll need to be on his own. I don't think he really has a clue what he's in for, Gibbs and I sheltered him. I think the old man knew he'd bolt if he got dumped right in the deep end, but figured he was worth the wait. Now I've gotta figure out if Ziva will follow his lead- hell, I've got to figure out if she'll follow _mine_. If either is _fit_ to be followed. Am I being selfish, Abs, not letting them go?"

"Pushing us and trying to keep the family together? Can't get much less selfish than that." She kissed his cheek. "I'm grateful, and when I forget to act like it, feel free to remind me."

Bashfulness antithetic to his cultivated image made him pull away from her with an air of mild embarrassment. "I don't need gratitude, as long as we all survive the next month and Ziva doesn't shoot anyone important, I swear I'll be happy forever."

Abby smiled at him with absolute faith, "You'll look after us, won't you?"

At those words something changed in him, something so fundamental even the atmosphere seemed altered. Abby saw it in his face, the moment when he became anchored, when he ceased to show her the insecurity, the vulnerability which had been there seconds before. When he decided she needed him to be invincible for her right now. She knew it must be scary, being the one everybody else leaned on, but he had been for years really, only Gibbs' totally hypothetical support away from being the lone pillar of team morale, the lightening rod of all emotions needing expression. The difference now was that there was no safety net to catch him if he should crumple, he _had_ to handle it, there was no one else. After today, after she got through the first day of _Gibbs is not coming back_ , then she could be there for him again; he could be real with her and straight with her like he never could be with the agents upstairs, but on _this_ day she was glad he was willing to protect her too.

He hugged her tightly, "'Course I will."

She believed him. Knew, in fact, that not only would he stretch himself to breaking to keep them together, he would protect any one of them with his dying breath. It was something that occasionally kept her up nights (those nights when she did actually intend to sleep), the way Tony always managed to find the situations where he could- and did- throw his life down to save someone else's. There was a streak of fatalism in him, a cavalier attitude towards his own continued existence which went beyond bravery, beyond valour and into something tragic. He didn't have a death wish, but _sometimes_... he kept her up nights.

"I know you can do it," she said after some moments, "but you don't _have_ to be Atlas here. I got pretty big shoulders, too."

"Abs," he tapped her nose, looking both exhilarated and terrified, "I promise not to try to carry the weight of the world without you."

"See that you don't." She smiled winsomely for only about thirty seconds before her cheer faltered, her face crumpling as the awfulness washed over her again in a wave. "How could he leave us?"

"I don't know," he brushed away her tears, solemn promise in his voice, "but I won't."


	4. Ducky

4\. Ducky

.

He'd been sitting at his desk in the dark for well over an hour. His back complained of the insufficiently ergonomic office chair and his limbs were stiff from maintaining a facetious posture of concentration over some paperwork. The illusion wasn't very thorough. Whom he was so half-heartedly attempting to fool and wherefore was murky even in his own mind. There were moments in life when one did not question one's inclinations towards mental absentia, because the only recourse would be to face what one would rather not and be henceforth engulfed. He preferred not to be _morose_ if he could help it and though he admitted to the occasional black, tempestuous humour, he prided himself on always having been mightily provoked.

He had not reached temporal anger in this instance, he was choleric only in the abstract as yet. Instead he was in a state he'd thought long left behind on the wild emotional roller-coaster of youth: one of being rocked by a betrayal years in the making. It was very likely ridiculous that he felt almost as he always had when he was inevitably cast off by his various long-term female companions, but here had been an intimacy- he'd _thought_ \- just as deeply felt and which had been just as callously thrown over. Impossible not to take it personally, no matter how selfish or petty that might be.

Autopsy's automatic doors whispered open and the slight puff of air rustled the papers in Ducky's left hand, light streaming in from the corridor glinting off the glasses dangling from his right. He need not turn in his chair to see who had entered. Even if he did not easily read the long, balanced stride and light, poised tread as that of an athlete prepared for action, he expected nothing less from the heir apparent than to sound every corner of his kingdom. Ducky wondered if he were last on the list and whether that meant anything.

"Good morning, Anthony," he said without looking up, making an attempt at his usual brisk tone only to sound more tired than ever. They were all of them tired, he knew, and Tony most of all. It was a weariness which wanted substantially more than a good night's sleep for remedy.

Tony said nothing as he came up beside Ducky's desk and leaned against the edge in his customary fashion, eyes downcast. He looked wound to the point of critical mass, his long legs crossed tightly at the ankle and his arms likewise crossed over his chest. Fine tendons stood out on his throat and hands, muscles bunched in tension throughout his lean frame. Ducky waited patiently for whatever throne speech he felt compelled to make to his inherited privy council. The boy had a certain sense of propriety- a quality always lacking in Gibbs- and the doctor knew he would not begin his tenure in earnest until he felt he had made right.

"I don't respect the way he left."

Well, it was all out in the open now, wasn't it. Ducky had been out of Britain too long to be magnanimous enough to take the part of his absent friend for sheer politeness' sake. It was meet to denounce Gibbs' manner of departure, meet even to re-evaluate the whole man. That he was not there to contradict any reassessment was testimony enough against him.

"Anthony, my dear boy, as much as it pains me," shrewd blue eyes met grey-green, "I can't bring myself to disagree."

Tony's head snapped around and he looked suddenly absurdly young in his surprise.

Ducky gave a sad smile at that innocence, a reminder that even the strongest men can still be children when their most solid and dependable convictions are turned on their heads. "None of us follows blindly, Tony."

The agent's face settled into a blank mask and he nodded, almost apologetically. He stared at the floor a few feet in front of him, buzzing with dark energy. A flame seemed to leap in his unfocused eyes, his fingers gripping the edge of the desk so tightly it creaked under his assault.

"He quit."

It had the quality of an agonising truth, one Tony clearly did not wish to believe though he knew that he must. Perhaps he'd come down here needing someone to pick a fight with, someone to defend his hero from the evidence of his own eyes, someone who could shed a hopeful light on Gibbs' character. Ducky regretted that he could not provide comfort of that sort if his guess was correct, but he had too much faith in the boy to coddle him. Few people indeed had he seen handle half so much catastrophe a fraction as well, and he had seen more souls under more duress than he cared to remember.

"He quit," Ducky agreed, resignation and the genesis of a steadily brewing anger tingeing his voice. "He lied to all of us and he let us down. I trust you will no longer be walking in his footsteps?"

Tony looked aghast, then merely disappointed, "I never really wanted to _be_ him, Ducky, you knew that didn't you? Didn't someone... he was gone, but still... and whatever worked, right?"

Ducky leaned back in his chair. He suspected it was more coping mechanism for the loss and uncertainty than a conscious leadership decision, but Anthony did not need calling out on that. He understood his flaws and frailties in a way not many younger people did, and he hid his understanding only from others, not from his own scrutiny. Ducky sometimes felt tempted to ask the boy why he spent so much energy preventing people from getting to know him, including the people for whom he cared most deeply, but the doctor would have felt cruel to deprive him of the walls he laboured on so industriously.

"So long as the team is together," Ducky elaborated.

"I just came from Abby," Tony said, as if that explained everything. In some ways it did.

Ducky put a hand on the young man's forearm, applying gentle pressure until he felt the corded muscles relax, saw the long, slim fingers go limp. He found himself studying that fine-boned elegance with mild envy. He had always had very large hands himself, thick and strong with blunt, purposeful fingers, and though not unshapely, they had not been up to the standards of his first piano teacher. He smiled slightly, at the memory and at Tony's acceptance of what comfort he could give, "She'll be all right, you know."

Tony had withdrawn from the edge of vulnerability, "Oh, I know. No thanks to me. I couldn't do anything for her, I can't do anything for any of them but keep them together and I wonder if I should. I'm not Gibbs, I don't know if I can keep all the balls in the air."

There was something to be said for Tony over his celebrated superior: he did not bend his morality for any loyalty, nothing was greater for him than what was right, nothing could mitigate black into grey. And he had never quit. Would never quit. "You're still here, Anthony."

Tony ticked his mouth to the side. "I guess."

"And you'll 'do'."

"Ducky-"

He held up a silencing hand, "Our mutual friend couldn't have given you higher praise, and I mean that most literally. He is reminded too much of himself to see that you are _quite_ unlike."

Tony's gaze was measuring.

Ducky smiled. "I compare you only outwardly, my boy. I am not yet so near-sighted as to mistake the appearance for the whole."

"It's too bad."

"Not being Gibbs?" The doctor raised an eyebrow. "Hardly."

Tony gave him that sceptical nod which was his habitual expression of incredulous disappointment. "Gibbs took two half-trained misfits, one not cut out for field work and one not cut out for _law enforcement_ , threw them under a proven screw up and he made us the best team in the agency. He played it so we all covered each others' weakness, used his psychic gut powers to step in right where we would have fallen on our faces. He never let us see where our butts were getting covered, let us think we were hot shots because he was so good he didn't need us to see how good he was. Stayed a step ahead of us, two steps ahead of the work, and three steps ahead of the bad guys.

"I can't do that, Ducky. I can handle the cases and the perps and the horror. I can handle McGee. I can handle Ziva. I can carry one of them, keep one of them out of the shit, but not both of them."

"You weigh yourself too cheaply, my boy," Ducky's voice was grave. "You have carried all of them this past year, even Jethro. He hasn't been quite himself since-"

"He is the job, how could he quit?" Tony exploded, flinging himself across the room as if propelled by the force of his passion. "How could he walk away _knowing_ they're not ready, with Kate's brains splattered over half a city block, how could he just walk away when it might happen again? So bureaucrats are bastards, what else is new, it makes it _even more important_ that we be there to protect them from _whoever_ they need protecting from. And Abby!"

"Tony," Ducky knew, he well knew. He would have looked in on Abigail himself if he had known where to find her, and poor Caitlin was rarely far from his thoughts. He'd never lost a woman that way, thought then that Jethro hadn't either, and he had found himself deeply changed by the experience. The illusion of safety had been forever breached, his sense of chivalry painfully violated. At least he had been able to mourn her and lay her in the earth. Tony would never be at peace with her death, there had been too much unsolved between them, too much they should- and shouldn't- have said to one another.

"She's still in the lab closet. I got her out, she saw her last Caf'Pow and went right back in." He scraped his hands through his hair, wide-eyed and frazzled. "Ziva's been crying, McGee's terrified of me; they're both so insecure it's like a sucker-punch in the gut even being in the room with them."

" _Tony_ ," he insisted, raising a placating hand.

"How could he leave them? Sure, leaving _me_ , I get that. That is totally understandable, it has a long history as a legitimate lifestyle choice, but _they_ deserve better than this bullshit."

"Anthony!" Ducky found himself standing slightly on tip-toe trying to get further into the agent's field of vision. He was sure he remembered a time, back home in Britain, when _everyone_ was not taller than he. "It won't happen to you. You won't leave them."

Tony leaned down, nose to nose with the pathologist, employing that familiar stare of total dominance he always swore up and down he couldn't produce. "How do you know?"

"I know you, Anthony," Ducky said, placing a special significance on the boy's name and deliberately voicing the American 'h' for emphasis. "In spite of all your efforts."

Doubt crept into Tony's stance, he regained a little of his height advantage and narrowed his eyes. He understood the message loud and clear: he didn't like it.

"You're _not_ Gibbs..."

Tony's eyes began to roll, his disgust palpable.

"...and I am so glad." Ducky gave a nod and smile which was half salute, half bow. He reached for Tony's hand and shook it, once, insistently. "I'm proud to be part of your team."

Tony stared a moment, his face slack. He looked down at their joined hands and his grip firmed even as his shoulders straightened. He acknowledged and accepted this oath of allegiance with a stately nod. It was no small thing, to have an ally in the struggle to reconcile loving Gibbs and hating what he'd done, to know someone else was secure enough in that love to be angry with him for it. For Ducky, it was more than the betrayal of what he thought his friend most strongly stood for, it was the revelation that apparently he was not enough of a friend to know about the most important single episode in Gibbs' life. For the team who looked up at their leader as something more than human and therefore less than a man, this was the inconceivable, and Tony would be punished for implying it was possible to carry on without him. For taking his place.

Ducky couldn't blame the children for their grief or alienation, but could tell already the toll it would take on their new guardian. That alone would have decided him to put his unmitigated support behind the young regent, but he also meant every word he had said. He was never more proud to serve.


	5. Kate

5\. ...Kate

.

The staircase seemed to loom, prodigious and eternal above him, three stories writ large in his imagination by the year passed in his nightmares. With each step his heart sank a little lower, his breath came a little harder. By the second floor he was drowning again, back in the terrible prison of illness and dread. Up too soon and running on pure adrenaline, he had had spots in his vision and his own desperate, gurgling breathing had deafened him to any other sound. He hadn't been ready for it, the plague like a ten tonne demon standing on his shoulders and gleefully stabbing daggers into his lungs. Blood pounding double time through his veins as he struggled to pretend he belonged in the field.

Blood poured out like water, flecks of skull floating serenely towards the edge of the glistening puddle. With her hair and that red shimmering pool spreading around her like a halo, a neat hole in the middle of her forehead, she was like some weird marriage of Catholic icon and Hindu goddess. He had stared down at her and thought of nothing. Then everything. That she was beautiful, that she was dead, that he had never told her he loved her. And there had not been time, not then, not to accept or rage or mourn; there was only the ridiculousness of the moment and the impotent instinct to squint stupidly in the direction of her death. They were both such easy, willing targets in that instant, he and Gibbs, it was almost cosmically unfair that they had been left unscathed.

He'd never escape these stairs, this uphill climb. Her blood was poured out like water and all his bones were out of joint.

He hadn't been back here since that day. He'd never left.

The door opening on the rooftop made a colossal protest as he pushed it to and even greater noise in closing behind him, its rusty hinges grinding resentfully. The air outside was crisp, the slight breath of wind biting through his clothes, his flesh, and chilling his very bones as it surrounded him with a sound like a distant whisper. The rough black top crunched beneath his feet and it seemed to him that he could feel every microscopic pebble through the thick rubber soles of his shoes. The skyline was bleak from here, sharp industrial lines broken only by the smog-belching smokestacks which obscured the faint, distant forms of the city beyond. Even his extraordinary vision could perceive nothing remarkable about the place, no lingering talisman to provide those left behind with a direction home.

Would he ever be through with being left behind? Even when he tried to do the leaving before he could be left, he never quite managed to get ahead of the tide.

He knew the spot, the exact spot, like he'd been fitted with a divining rod. The last place on earth she had been warm and real and present. Here, _right here_ , was where her heart beat its final rhythm. All possible emotion rose in his throat, his voice so thick it would have been unrecognisable to her if she were actually there to hear it.

"Hey, Katie."

He almost laughed. He knew how much she hated to be called that. He'd saved it for special occasions, for those moments she was particularly delightful in her grouchy little storm cloud of gender issues and we-have-a-serious-job-I-will-take-it-seriously pro-activeness. It made him smile to see her flush with an emotion which was simultaneously annoyance, pleasure, and embarrassment. She'd been Katie as a little girl, he knew instinctively, and somewhere along her path of struggle into what was still a man's world in the worst draconian sense, she had decided that little girl must be put away with all childish things. A man who had never had a childhood, he felt that loss too keenly not to ruin her day by reminding her she was still, sometimes, just a little girl.

He put down the bouquet he'd bought from her favourite florist. The flowers were all shades and mixtures, no solid colour in the lot. Across it he lay the one white rose he'd plucked up on impulse when he went to pick up the arrangement. He didn't know what he meant by it, exactly, but he was sure that she would understand.

"So I'm big cheese now," he told her, feeling self-conscious. Would she have been proud of him? Beneath the inevitable teasing and the snide comments, would he have seen some glitter of felicitation in her big brown eyes? Hysteria edged into his voice and his laugh sounded shrill in his own ears. "Did you ever think you'd see the day?

"Me neither."

His sad smile faded and he felt deflated, threadbare. "Though I guess you were right. You didn't."

Of all the people he had loved who never knew him, she sometimes seemed the closest and often the furthest away. As he'd gone through Gibbs' desk in the wee hours of the morning, stranded and helpless, he had found something. A sketchbook, clearly not something belonging to his ex-boss, and which he had held in shaking hands for over ten minutes before he could gather up the willpower to confirm what he already knew. The first page was a drawing of himself, unmistakably hers though this time not satiric or silly, but a detailed, organic portrait filled with such warmth and understanding he couldn't stand to look at it. He felt such profound loss, such keen grief, he half expected to find it was still _that_ terrible morning after and the whole intervening year had been a dream.

He lay himself down beside her shade, stretching out his full length and letting his head rest against the roughness of the roof. Staring up at stars that seemed to shift and blur, he had a moment to wonder if the cosmos themselves were restless before the hot tears spilled over his eyelashes and tracked down his temples into his hairline.

Smothered by the off-black of imperfect city darkness, alone with her memory, he was not ashamed to cry. Cry as he could not when he stood over her coffin across the grave from the crumbling façade that was her bombed-out parents, their pinched faces silently damning him for being alive when she was not. The sheer inadequacy of his guilt and pain in the face of their relentless suffering like a living thing coiled heavy in his breast, strangling his heart. Cry as he could not in front of Gibbs who was waffling, McGee who was sad but not broken, Abby who needed him to be okay so she could fall apart, and Ducky whose cup runneth over with looking after Gibbs.

He was the only one who was dysfunctional enough to be _angry_. He imagined Kate would have thought it'd be Gibbs with his vengeance complex, but Gibbs was only lost. Everyone else was grieved, normal and healthy and sorrowful. _Tony_ repressed and lashed out irrationally. His approach to dealing with the things he couldn't bear, not to deal with it, borrowed from his highly strung English mother. Considering he'd found out when he was ten where that road ended, he was pretty fucking stupid to keep trudging along it waiting for the inevitable day a bottle of pills or a full metal jacket to the cranium would become his only options.

He was still angry and that was scary, but at least he could finally cry. For her life being wasted, for never letting her in, for not learning anything from it. Here with her, where there were no expectations, no responsibilities any more, he could finally let go. Kate had no demands for him, he had already failed her.

He put a hand out, imagining hers were there to intertwine with his. He scraped fruitlessly at the cold, merciless surface of the tarmac, the unrefined rock chips sharp enough to bite into the pads of his fingers.

"I miss you."

He wiped ineffectually at his cheeks, then curled inward on a laugh that became a sob. "I really miss you."

There were three women who had fought and bled beside him at NCIS; he'd teased them all, trusted them, put his life in their hands. All three of them were teammates, soldiers, friends to the death, but only Kate was family. And because she was family, of course, she could and had hurt him far more deeply than any mere friend or foe ever could.

It was all for her benefit. Every bit of it. For two years she had shaped him into an image she could understand, an image she could fight and conquer without struggle or scruple. Kate had hated grey areas. She was for every bit of it or she was for none of it. So he had become someone uncomplicated, someone who lived down to all of her worst expectations, someone inhuman. When they met he was already the boyish, faux-suave, dumb ex-jock because it was a perfect counterpoint to Gibbs' Marine severity and had always served amazingly well in getting people to both trust and underestimate him. Become an archetype, everyone thinks they got you pegged, and people don't fear what they think they got figured out. He'd added outrageous flirtatiousness partly because it amused Abby and annoyed Viv, but it also distracted people from his real motivations.

Kate had taken less than a second to decide he was incompetent, sexist, immature and beneath her contempt. He played into it once she'd decided, of course. It made her comfortable enough to relax her jock-strap shtick a bit and at least she noticed he was alive when she was ripping him a new one, but he always hoped that she would start to see through it. See how much of it she had had a hand in making. Even as she came to tolerate him and seemed to take a grudging liking to him, she'd never really stopped believing that he was only senior to her through part old boy's club prejudice and part fluke. God, it made him sad. It was his own fault, he never pretended it wasn't, but he always thought they'd know him better after everything they went through together. The cracks sure showed, but she never noticed them.

That was, until Paraguay; he regretted scaring her, hadn't intended to, but he didn't realise how attached she was to the status quo.

_'I clung to that fantasy I had and you helped me.'_

She was lying next to him just as she looked on her last day, response gear in place, bullet holes in her vest and forehead.

He choked on a half gasp half sob and turned his head back to stare at the sky in abject misery. "Haven't seen you for a while. Please don't talk to me about Ziva again. I couldn't take that."

 _'She only intimidates you on Mondays, right? And you thought_ I _was hard to train.'_ Her laugh was gentle, tinkling and far away. There was a wistful knowledge in it he had never heard before, the wisdom of someone looking back free of bitterness but not without regret. _'I'm sorry about the last time you saw me, I guess I wasn't ready then for unfinished business. I am now.'_

"So this is a serious visitation. No Catholic schoolgirl outfits." His eyes were drawn back to her against his will. His Katie, dead and lovely. The tears flowed freely and a thrumming pain began to swell in his chest.

 _'Sorry, Anthony.'_ She smiled and it was that sweet, soft smile he had so rarely received from her, the one that made her eyes light up until her whole face seemed luminous.

"That's new." It sounded strange to hear her call him by his right name, the one he always called himself, and as if she understood the difference it made. He supposed you knew these things when you were dead.

 _'I saw you for the first time in Paraguay, not the way I wanted to, but what was really there,'_ she said, without preamble, as if they'd been having this conversation all along. _'I was so comfortable with you, thinking you were this overgrown puppy I could take out with my pinky finger- totally unintimidating and a joke as a leader. You honestly made me forget you were a cop and a senior agent, that you were twice my size and just as capable. You meant me to, I know.'_

Why did he do that to his partner as well as his enemies? Why did he actively hide his light under a bushel even as he hoped desperately for someone to notice it streaming through the cracks? She didn't seem interested in asking about the whys. Just as well, he couldn't have answered her if she were.

_'Then, without warning, you grew into a giant right in front of me, terrifying, carved out of granite.'_

He remembered her face in that moment, her eyes wide with shock and something like fear, fear of the unknown, of his being so divorced from her expectations of him. She always looked a little stunned when he gave her orders he really meant for her to follow, but this was something different. An epiphany had been reached, an impasse, the game they had both been playing with various levels of conscious intent was at last at an end.

_'I guess somewhere deep in my brain I always knew that side of you was in there, because when you gave me serious orders I followed them and with less crap than I gave Gibbs, funny enough, but I didn't want to face it, kept it locked up, and Paraguay broke the spell. I tried to escape it, I wanted things the way they were, with me safely in control, safely superior. I didn't want my world to change.'_

They were flat on their backs, their faces turned towards each other, nose to nose. He couldn't feel her breath on his lips as she spoke, but her fingers intertwined with his were warm and solid as the roof he lay on.

_'I played that game of ours even when the plague made it clear time was running out. I didn't let it in until the moment I gave up on you.'_

He prayed she didn't feel guilty for giving him up, he'd given himself up. "When you told Ducky I was dying... I _was._ "

Her eyes were sad, sorry. _'I cried then because I never knew you and I'd lost my chance. I couldn't let you drop the mask as long as there was hope, I couldn't handle it. Not saying goodbye like that, not the fallout if you made it somehow, my idea of myself relied too heavily on the straw man we'd created between us. When there wasn't any more hope, I couldn't pretend any more.'_

Her fingers squeezed his hand. _'When you pulled through, I thought I'd have plenty of time to change things.'_

"I keep thinking that, every time I escape to a new place, make myself into a new person for a new job. I figure there'll be time for me to let them in. Every day I think: 'Tomorrow, I'll let them in. There's time.' I'm always wrong." He wanted to grab her, hold her close, keep her from fading away, but he felt heavy as lead and didn't move. "Why do I do it? Lie to you, push you all away until it backfires in my face and I gotta get out... And why did I stay this time when I've never wanted so badly to run?"

_'Because Tony, there are people here who get you now. There are people here who love you.'_

"That's never held me back before." His eyes were stinging from too much salt, and Kate seemed to blur in and out. "It's you. I can't run from you now no matter where I go, can I?"

She smiled again. _'You never could, DiNozzo.'_

He almost rolled his eyes, almost snorted in derision; it was so typical, so normal. But that was another lifetime, and he couldn't forget that no matter how much he wanted to, not with a certain ragtag bunch of misfits back in the squad room- his team- clinging to him for salvation, sheltering behind him from the storm. Not with the bullet hole in Kate's forehead reminding him how much they were in need of shelter.

Kate saw his impassive expression, but it didn't put her off her game as it had back in that other life where he was simple and she was alive. Instead, she considered for a moment before reaching over to rest her hand on his arm.

_'There were a lot of things I always wanted to ask you. Don't suppose you'd give me any answers now?'_

"Don't see why not," he said, only slightly choked, "You won't be telling anyone, will you?"

_'Guess not.'_

He had a sudden, horrific impulse to wonder if the full metal jacket _hole the size of a grapefruit right about there, Probie_ was still there. A wave of nausea passed over him and he shut his eyes tight, not wanting to see, not wanting to remember. He had been there. Right beside her. A stray scrap of metal had torn through her brain and shattered her skull like fine crystal on a marble floor, raining razor-edged shards that forever wounded all the lives she'd touched. Two or three nights a month he felt that hot spray on his face, he tasted the salty, metallic tang of blood on his lips, he relived his front row view of her head caving in and it would rouse him from sleep with a primal scream. He always wondered what terrible, tortured thing could make such a horrific sound before he realised it was himself.

 _'Tony,'_ she was in her date dress, the one he had declared insufficiently sexy. Its skimpy straps did nothing to cover her bare shoulders, but she didn't seem to feel the cold. Her forehead was smooth, but she still had a microphone strapped to her neck and her bullet proof vest was folded beneath her head like a pillow.

"What did you want to ask me, Kate?" She could probably read his mind, anyway.

_'What was the truth about your family?'_

"I told it. Mostly." He smiled at her before turning away with a carefully casual air. "My mother died when I was ten."

She understood the unspoken request and heeded it. _'And you were an only child.'_

"Obviously." They shared a look which was wonderfully comfortable, painfully normal. "My father cut me off when I was twelve, but he didn't kick me out of the house until high school. This was the military, all-year boarding version of high school, Katie. We had uniforms too, but they weren't very sexy."

 _'I'm sure you looked hot with a buzz cut.'_ She smiled coyly. It was the first time she'd ever complimented him without putting a back-hand in there somewhere. That was worrying.

"Not really. I was skinny, too tall too fast, all arms and legs." He shifted, feeling awkward. "It was the last thing my father ever paid for, you know. He thought I'd hate it, that I'd come around to his way of thinking; focus on becoming just like him so I could take over the family business one day. He was dead wrong."

_'Tony?'_

"I put myself through college and grad school on scholarships and loans, just to annoy him. You don't need a masters to be a cop, which was what I decided I was gonna be before he even sent me away. Works out, though, you do need one to be a senior special agent."

_'When did you put on the mask?'_

He couldn't breathe, there was a weight on his chest. "I don't know."

_'Are you ever going to take it off?'_

"I don't know."

_'They need you, you know. Even though they won't realise it. I almost never did.'_

He fought the urge to thank her for dropping it right when she was on the cusp of breaking him. One day he'd have let himself be broken, but not today, not when he needed the wall more than ever.

"Almost?"

_'I wasn't as thick as all that, Tony. You're not the only one who can put on a show. You'll notice I didn't bitch about your commands until after the fact. When we were in the shit, I understood why you led and I followed; it was only back in the less real world of safety I didn't get it, couldn't see it.'_

With a supreme effort of will, he conquered the lethargy that seemed to pin him to the roof, raising his free hand to her jaw and pulling her even closer, so close he could count the flecks of honey-gold in her dark brown eyes. "Then... if you knew me, even sometimes, if you even think you knew me..."

_'I liked you, Anthony. I always liked you, even when I bought your whole act and couldn't imagine why I would. And I was proud of you today._

_'I'm so proud of you.'_

"Kate..."

 _'You never failed me and you won't fail them. Just focus on the fact they're calling you "boss", Boss.'_ She seemed to giggle and it was so familiar it ached, so familiar and so missed.

"...don't leave me."

But she was gone, he was alone on the rooftop, it was quarter to two and he was cold.

He looked up at the stars again, dimmed by the city lights, but still present and absurdly- in his obviously addled mind- spelling out a certain tired catch-phrase.

Semper fi.


	6. Gibbs

6\. Gibbs

.

It wasn't that different.

He could still rattle DiNozzo with less than three words and the rest of the team still asked him how high whenever he so much as thought the word jump. Ziva still moped after him ever-so-slightly with her neurosis cocktail of survivor guilt and daddy issues. Abby still loved him unconditionally. McGee still looked at him the way a field mouse looks at an oncoming combine harvester.

He was pretty sure that was the way he remembered it.

Ducky was different, but then Ducky was the only actual grown-up in the building, so it was to be expected he'd be more complex. Ducky felt betrayed for reasons beyond Gibbs' grasping and a few more he could comfortably guess at (but didn't think much of ). All he knew for certain was, he was now last on Ducky's list, end of the pecking order. It was unfamiliar and undeserved and he didn't like it. There were years between him and Ducky, there was blood, none of these kids really understood that (for all they were _good_ kids).

Well, tit for tat, Doctor Mallard. He was damn sure he didn't remember himself ever being the type to gush about his past or his feelings to any friend, and anyone who knew him at all shouldn't have been surprised that there were things he wasn't keen on sharing. Anyone who really knew him would have respected his decision about what parts of his life were open for discussion, would have understood why he didn't want to bring another lifetime into his here and now. If he was gonna stay back, he guessed he'd have to draw the lines a little clearer. Just in case they started thinking they were entitled to stomp stupidly through his privacy.

Between DiNozzo's mother-hen hovering, McGee's enormous cow-eyes and Ziva's tight-lipped little smiles, he'd be lucky to ever get a moment to himself again. Tony didn't seem to think he was capable of hitting the head on his own and he'd learned enough of Gibbs' management techniques to start being really annoying about it.

_You are pretty messed up still, Jethro. Sometimes you think Tony's Stan. Sometimes you think he's Mike. Sometimes you wonder if you ever knew who that kid was or if you were faking it for five years and getting lucky._

Ziva seemed to think he was her own personal superhero and her eagerness to be grateful had her chasing his heels waiting for his next heroic achievement.

 _Stop calling her Kate, stop_ wanting _her to be Kate. That's a start._

He probably never would have believed Ziva cowering in his basement in tears asking to be saved if he hadn't seen it for himself, but under the circumstances he could understand. This wasn't simple danger she was running from, she wasn't afraid of the things she could fight and she sure didn't need his help fighting them, this was total betrayal and isolation. A country, culture, and brethren she could no longer return to; most of all, this was a father she was running from. From a father, to a father.

One of several reasons she had called _him_ \- retired and thousands of miles away- and not Tony. The others having to do with DiNozzo just not being bad enough in situations which didn't allow for him to annoy people into giving him what he wanted. He couldn't go through Ziva, never mind Ziva's whole organisation _and_ the US federal forces. Gibbs could go through anything if he got pissed enough. Besides _he'd_ never have let it happen in the first place. His team wasn't blind-sided, wasn't left behind, wasn't alone, not on his watch.

Ziva was safe now working at her desk, her least favourite pastime. Although she was humming while she did it, which was something he'd never noticed before. Meaning, of course, that she'd never done it before, because if she had, he would have noticed. McGee was a little off, too. Less jumpy, less peeking over his monitor like a meerkat when he thought Gibbs wasn't looking. Their serenity didn't have any comfortable air of familiarity, in fact it seemed to put him on edge. It must not usually be like this. Something _was_ different, something besides Ducky, and if he could just shake the cobwebs from his head, he'd be able to figure out what.

A hollow clunk forced him from his thoughts.

"This is for you." Jenny tapped a carefully manicured pink fingernail on the VHS she'd just dropped onto his desk.

He looked at it, then swept his eyes slowly upwards to meet hers, oozing impatience. "And this is?"

She met his unimpressed eyebrow lift with a smile and almost palpable smugness, then she turned to walk away. As she passed Tony's desk she shot Gibbs an intent look over her shoulder, "Something I think you should see."

Right.

Where the hell was Tony anyway? His 'loyal St. Bernard' needed a choke chain.

He tossed the tape onto his coffee table as he walked through his living room that evening. There wasn't any television or VCR in there, but it seemed like the logical place, even though. He headed to the kitchen, opened the fridge long enough to decide food was overrated, and grabbed a beer to take with him to the shop where he could be engulfed in his boat: boat smell, boat under his hands, boat above his head and cold, unrelenting concrete beneath his boots. He didn't have much use for the sea any more, but there was nothing like an unfinished hull to remind you life didn't need to be so complicated.

Gibbs was only on his second beer when Abby tip-toed down the stairs in her stocking feet, coming to rest on the fourth step from the bottom like an alighting sparrow. She was so quiet, so non-threatening and unobtrusive, he might not have noticed her were he actually working and not just telling himself he was working while he shuttled boards aimlessly back and forth across his shop. Maybe he was getting soft.

The silence lasted an hour before he felt the hair start to stand up on the back of his neck, his movements suddenly the tiniest bit self-conscious. He'd never been the first to crack, he was never uncomfortable in silence, but this was Abby and she had been sitting on his step in perfect stillness longer than he had ever seen her stay in one room.

Gibbs hefted another board, "Don't need a suicide watch, Abs."

"Probably not," she agreed, her tone even and pitched low. The slightly gravelly quality of her voice thrummed musically on extended vowels. Her natural voice, her serious voice; it had been a long time since he had heard it. "I'm not really here for you right now."

He didn't like the note of apology in that. He didn't like the regret. "Okay."

A moment passed. He waited.

"You left us without glue." She met his gaze with huge, earnest green eyes.

He crossed his arms, waiting for an Abby-to-English translation. Knowing his stare was mostly ineffective with her, he honed it in on her anyway for the hell of it.

"And it was hard, Gibbs, really hard." Her plaintive expression was as sad as her please-don't-go face had been, but he'd ignored that one, too. "We need glue."

He leaned against the ribs of the boat, "What are you trying to say, Abs? You want an apology? Because I don't have one."

She frowned at him like he was letting her down all over again, "I don't want one, I don't need one- well it might have been nice and I would probably have felt all warm and fuzzy and I could have let you hug Bert and I wouldn't need to hold your coffee hostage any more, but-"

"Abby."

"It's for Tony." She was dead serious now, all possibility of Hysteria Abby making an appearance gone in a twinkling.

Gibbs didn't react, mostly because he wasn't sure how he would or should react if he let himself.

"Tony was our glue when you left," she tucked her chin between her raised knees and wrapped her arms around her calves, pulling herself into a little protective ball. "And we really didn't make it easy on him."

"Abs," he drew a careful breath. This was Abby. She was sensitive. And he wasn't even sure what made him so angry about his people confronting him with something he did, in fact, do. They may not have a right to answers, but he couldn't really say they were wrong to ask questions. It went too hard against the grain of what he always tried to teach them. "How does that equal an apology from _me_?"

She was wearing her Unreasonable Face. His second wife had used that face and his memories were not fond. "You quit, Gibbs. You quit and you left and he had to try to be hard on us and soft with us and fill the void without taking your place and you were _gone_. We were abandoned and we took it out on him because he was the one who made us face it. And _I_ am going to make up for what _I_ did after the leaving, but I didn't _do_ the leaving, Gibbs. I can't make up for that. It's not just that you left us and we hurt him for it, you left him, too."

"Why's he special?" Gibbs found himself deeply annoyed. "I don't see you giving me lectures about leaving McGee and Ziva, do I? Or Ducky?"

"Because they didn't have to be you! We got to be us and feel however we wanted to feel and say whatever we wanted to say and go all crazy if we needed to. Tony had to pick up the pieces, he had to be leader and tell us all to move on and we _hated_ him for it. He couldn't be unreasonable, he had to be the glue." She chewed her thumbnail anxiously, looking deceptively petite and fragile in the warm light of the trouble lamp, her white skin washed out to alabaster thinness. She looked at him again and he could see every vein, every worry-line, every sleepless night in sharp relief on her face. She smiled tightly, "And you should thank him because he didn't have to and because if he hadn't done it there'd be no team to come back to when you realised how stupid it was to quit."

Gibbs still wasn't really sure why their issues were his problem. They were his employees not his family. He didn't owe them anything but competent leadership and the illusion of safety, and it seemed to him from Abby's melodramatic tear-jerker tales of woe that he'd provided that even when he left by promoting DiNozzo. Who- who'd have guessed- was someone willing to be insufferable if he had to be. Be a bastard. That's what it took. DiNozzo didn't have any Bs, so he had to be a dick, but the principle was the same.

"Seems to me, Abs," she was special, he had to look after her, but she needed to see that work was still work, "Tony did his job. If he went above and beyond the call of duty, that's for the Director to say. What he does when he's not working for me is not my jurisdiction. Only thing that matters to me is he didn't screw the pooch."

She stared at him as if he were drowning a kitten with every word. "How can you say that?"

"That's life!" he snapped at her, hating that she wasn't on his side. First Ducky, now Abby, what the hell happened to these people while he was in Mexico? They used to get it. "I don't remember you going to bat like this for Stan or Viv or any of the other charity cases I've had stagger through their first gig on my team. This is a job, Abby, not group therapy. If DiNozzo couldn't cut it, I'd fire him, the fact that he's _not_ fired is all the thanks he deserves for _doing his job_. I don't apologise to my Stans, Abby. It's a sign of-"

"No. Stop." She stood, looming over him from the high ground with righteous tears in her eyes. "Tony isn't a Stan. Tony is _Tony_ and you _owe_ him an apology. Maybe you should go back to Mexico until you remember why."

Every door in her path slammed behind her as she walked swiftly and purposefully out of the house.

Well that went well. Abby was too much of a bleeding heart sometimes, always taking on causes. He thought he remembered she'd never liked DiNozzo half as much as she'd liked Burleigh, but here she was trying to tell him Tony was more than a Stan. He wouldn't have allowed that. Would he?

He ran over his last memory of the team before he'd left. _You'll do. You're a good agent. I owe you. Semper fi._

Yeah, that seemed about right. He was a little too thick with Ziva for his liking, but that couldn't be helped given what was between them. Besides, he was always easier on women. It was a personal failing. That's why Kate always got away with-

_"So what do you think?"_

_Tony turned to look at him, his usual twinkle and his usual half-mischievous smirk belied by the look of serious consideration in his eyes. "She's sure got spunk."_

_Gibbs grinned, "Well yeah, I know that, DiNozzo, I was the one who got to hear about her jock strap. What do you think about a smaller workload?"_

_"Personally, boss, I would love to have my Friday nights free. I would." He ran a hand through his hair, long and slicked back, too dark for his skin. It was a pretty weak attempt to look older in Gibbs' opinion, but it went well with Tony's faux-suave human stereotype act so it worked out all right. Kid sure as hell didn't need to be any better looking._

_"But?"_

_"Viv had a lot of spunk, too." Tony leaned carefully against the elevator wall and Gibbs wondered how his ribs were healing up after that baseball bat two cases back. Maybe he shouldn't have made him carry all the gear. He really probably shouldn't have put him in a body bag and handed him over to the FBI. Didn't want him back on the couch again, complaining about the non-existent entertainment system in Gibbs' living room._

_He conceded the point with a nod, "You really think she might turn out like Blackadder or you just being paranoid?"_

_"Paranoid, boss." Tony flashed his billion-dollar grin, "I could use a partner."_

_"You mean another one."_

_The smile, incredibly, got even brighter. "Yeah. That's what I mean."_

That didn't really seem right. He didn't ask for personal opinions from Stans, especially not about who would be on his team. That was his call.

Kate had turned out better than Blackadder, though she'd choked her fair share. It was just that she never choked so stupidly she almost got her whole team killed. Gibbs was pretty sure he still had a bump on his head from that one, and come to think of it, he never did find out how DiNozzo managed to keep from getting dead after his cover was blown. He didn't preside over the case paperwork and the incident report on account of his loss of neutrality.

Of course, Tony might have preferred Viv getting him killed if he'd known her replacement was going to keep grinding him into the dirt beneath her heel long after she'd made her point. He never planned on someone thick enough to buy his act even two years in, but smart enough not to take it. Those two clowns would be the death of... wait.

_It was after. After what he wasn't sure, but the kid was sitting in the back of an ambulance, long legs hanging over so his feet touched the pavement. His expression was stony and void of any emotion except sheer determination. His skin was grey, unhealthy, with a sheen of long illness on top of the more immediate haggardness of shock. He didn't seem to be hurt, but the EMTs wanted oxygen on him and his face looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse. The blood on his cheeks smeared into wavy lines where the elastic on the O2 mask rubbed against his skin._

_None of it made sense._

_And Gibbs was mopping blood off the kid's face with a handkerchief. He wasn't saying anything, but he remembered a lump in his throat the size of an orange full of all the things he_ wished _he could say, all the things he swallowed. Why? What would have been so terrible about a few words of comfort?_

_"You look like shit," he finally heard himself say and that, at least, was familiar._

_"That a step up or down from 'crap', boss?" The kid, DiNozzo, tried to laugh but it became strangled and choked even before the coughing fit started._

_All Gibbs knew was that his stomach lurched and he was nearly sick and he nearly wept and he was left wondering why he couldn't do either._

Kate. Saying she'd worked out better than Blackadder might be in poor taste considering Blackadder was back at the FBI and Kate was six feet under. But he knew that, he'd more or less handled that (hadn't he?). It was something about Kate...

_He's dying, Ducky._

Sweet fuck. The plague. How could he have forgotten the damn _plague_. Of all the handful of things too many he'd seen almost kill Anthony DiNozzo, that was the one he would have put money on never, ever forgetting.

What else did he know that he did not know? Whole blocks of memories were elusive, but present, like fever dreams. How could he know what was real?

He'd almost decided it was time to get out the bourbon when he remembered the video tape. He doubted very distinctly that Jenny had managed to record any of their long lost past together, and he couldn't think of anything else personal she'd want him to see. That left something professional. And something professional had to help buff out the dents. And he'd better buff them out before he slipped where someone would notice.

By the time decision had fully crystallised, he was sitting in a conference room on the Navy Yard firing up the VCR. Eventually everything would make the jump to digital and he'd be shit out of luck, but NCIS was a little behind the state of the art where it didn't really matter. Being the red-headed stepchild of federal agencies wasn't always a completely negative thing, especially not in his book. He enjoyed being a cowboy.

Glad as he was to be back (he couldn't stay away), there was still something way off. Nothing felt quite right. It was close enough to feeling like home that he knew he was right to come back, but it was far enough from comfortable for him to know he'd fucked something up bad by leaving. Maybe it was better this way, but he couldn't tell (he'd never liked change much). Couldn't find out until he had the full picture. He pressed play.

The video was a medium shot of McGee, ear protection around his neck and safety glasses pushed up onto his forehead, with a clear view of the target behind him. He was alone on the shooting range.

"Camera set up?"

McGee turned towards the off-screen voice, frowning in confused disapproval. "Where's my firearms examiner?"

"You're looking at him," Tony entered frame with his hands spread as if in offering and wearing a slight smile, but he put on a serious air as he stepped up to McGee. He invaded the other agent's personal space just enough to fluster him, measuring something in his expression. "You ready for this?"

"Wait," McGee's frown deepened and his head tilted away so he was looking at Tony down his nose, nodding as he spoke. Full-on probie mode. Gibbs hadn't seen him so nervous with DiNozzo since before he joined the team. "You're going to do it? You're going to be my examiner?"

Tony nodded slowly, looking stern but amused in spite of himself. "Yeah, McGee."

"But you- I- we're-" McGee's brow furrowed. "We're team-mates."

"We are team-mates, but I'm team leader. I'm also the one who gets aerated if you can't cut the mustard. I'd say that gives me an unusual interest. C'mon." Tony put a hand on McGee's shoulder to guide him towards the firing position.

McGee didn't move with the light touch and Tony's hand slid away as he turned back again. McGee looked to be turning options over in his mind and Gibbs could see the kid was weighing his sense of righteousness with his imagination of what the consequences might be for sticking up for it.

"You're not an expert, though. You're just a field agent like me," McGee said, somewhat apologetically.

DiNozzo sighed dramatically. "No, not quite, _probie_."

"Well no, Tony, but come on, I mean..." he shrugged helplessly, "You're not exactly an impartial judge."

The senior agent nodded in agreement. "Maybe not, but I am triple qualified to teach marksmanship and I am an order of magnitude better at it than you are, so I feel like I can live with that."

The two agents stared at each other, McGee studying DiNozzo's neutral stance with distrust, as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. Gibbs wondered if Tony had given the team any kind of transitional period or if he'd just walked in his first day being boss as a totally different person than they were expecting and completely messed up their ability to interact with him. It always creeped Gibbs out just a little when he did that, made that tenth of a second jump from easily-read, obtuse and friendly to impassive, piercing and chilly. You forgot it happened moments after, he made you forget. Even Gibbs found himself slipping into complacency and starting to buy it.

McGee pressed his lips together, opened his mouth, studied Tony a moment, and pressed his lips together again. Finally he inclined his head, his eyes guarded, "You're really taking this seriously, aren't you?"

"It is serious." Tony's shoulders relaxed a bit as if he now understood McGee's reaction. "Look, I'm sorry if I'm coming on strong, but you have to be up to standard and I have to show them you're up to standard. I have to show them _I'm_ up to standard. You shouldn't have to go through this this way, and I'm sorry about that too, I really am. You want to do this now, Kemosabe, or you want me to push it back? Director said to take my time, she'll assign a new MCRT if that's what it takes."

McGee made a face at being given yet another nickname. "One thing. While I'm thinking. What was _your_ nickname in FLETC?"

For the first time on the tape, Tony grinned a real, patented DiNozzo grin. "Robin Hood."

"Of course."

Tony tapped his temple, "Twenty ten vision, McEnvious." He paused. "And by the time I went to FLETC I'd been through military school, police academy, four years on a beat and two as a shield. It's not really an heroic accomplishment being better than a bunch of college kids at that point."

Seeming to catch something out about that speech- _you're learning, McGee_ \- the younger agent flipped his safety glasses down over his eyes (rolling them only slightly) with a rakish smile. "Well, I don't know if I can split an arrow, but I think I'm ready to give it a try."

"Great!" Tony clapped him on the back. "When you pass, and I know you will, I'll buy you a drink or three. And maybe a new shirt. You need to get out more."

Gibbs watched the ensuing proficiency tests with a practised eye and he had to admit, he really hadn't expected DiNozzo to be such a hard ass. Nor had he thought McGee could get that much faster with his non-dominant hand in less than a week. By the time he was through, McGee sure needed that drink. But he had done it and judging by the weary, beautific smile he gave the camera as he turned it off, he knew he had really earned it.

He didn't think the tape was anything significant, however. Why Jenny had thought it was something he really needed to see, he had no idea. It's not like he didn't know his agents were good, he wouldn't keep them around if they weren't. It's not like he didn't know DiNozzo could run the ship if he wanted to, that's why he left him in charge. Kid was fearless, but not stupid. He balanced frighteningly stark pragmatism, uncompromising morals and idealistic bravery, along with just enough cynicism to be a truly great leader.

Wait.

Was that right?

_Did you use to know him well, Jethro?_

_Sorry, I forgot your minds work concurrently. It's not pretty, but it's effective. What, you think I keep him around for his personality? As far as I'm concerned you're irreplaceable._

_You used to know him,_ better. _No one knows him_ well, _do they?_

_When did you stop noticing?_

He had to talk to McGee and Ziva. He might even have to apologise.


	7. Counterpoint: Jethro and Timothy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: There's conflicting canon about McGee's education. I went with two Bachelor degrees in this (instead of a Bachelor and a Master) because it makes some sense of the issue of his temporary promotion.
> 
> Tony: I get it. You don't like being called probie any more?  
> McGee: Things change.  
> Tony: Yes, I know. I used to be team leader.  
> McGee: Temporary team leader. And that was only because Gibbs quit.  
> Tony: You don't think I rate my own team?  
> McGee: Wouldn't be here now if you did, would you, DiNozzo.  
> -4.03 "Singled Out"

7\. Counterpoint: Jethro and Timothy

.

It was definitely the opportune moment. If he wanted to find out about the team he'd left behind and the team they had become without him, it was the opportune moment.

Strange to see DiNozzo shrink from a challenge like that; leaving McGee guilty and uncertain, shocked by what he had said and by the usually fluent heckler's low-key reaction. Once Gibbs would have understood the exchange, would have known why it was more than a simple retaliation that slipped from McGee's control and became a truly barbed sting, tearing into its target and drawing real blood instead of just knocking him down a peg. McGee still wasn't good at this game- at an unfair disadvantage, he bore more than his just share and eventually the fangs were bound to come out- but this was so much more. This was a primal thing which needed expression, which _would_ be expressed with or without McGee's conscious consent.

Something had changed fundamentally in the dynamic. And it wasn't really the nickname that bothered him.

Still.

"McGee."

He jumped a little, his eyes were a little wide, but it was nothing like the terrified-woodland-creature reaction Gibbs was accustomed to evoking in him.

"How long have I been an NCIS Special Agent?"

Pale green eyes flicked up towards him and filled with misgiving. They both knew where the conversation was headed. It was something McGee already understood if he'd just take the time to realise that he did. "Almost sixteen years."

"Wanna take a wild guess what my first partner _still_ calls me?"

McGee nodded and his eyes slid away, the tender part of his bottom lip sucked against his teeth as he thought.

Gibbs left him to soak in the gentle reprimand, and feeling he'd done right enough, engulfed himself in shadow to observe what would happen next. Recon was the better part of valour and McGee was the easiest person to read in the entire building. Sane, too. Which made one of them. They'd always needed someone normal: one well-adjusted, fully-functional adult, someone whose mental state was both obvious and stable. He thought he'd found that in Kate, but she just wasn't having the right buttons pushed when they met. Less than two minutes as DiNozzo's subordinate and the other shoe had dropped.

He wondered if she ever knew how good it could be for her, the way Tony brought out the deepest of her hidden insecurities along with the most neglected of her joys. It was painful, but exorcising the demon that was DiNozzo made her a better agent and a stronger person.

Goddamn Tony and his Goddamn twisted martyr complex. Gibbs had half a mind to think that idiot had done it on purpose. He was starting to remember now, flashes of the time before, a between time, before the established team but after their predecessors. He was starting to remember a homicide detective from Baltimore who was more like Columbo than Bluto and turned off the shtick like a tap. To remember Viv Blackadder's only other big assignment with him, how the case had lead them to old haunts in Peoria.

_"So you were stuck with DiNozzo here, huh?" she said, an eyebrow arched and painted lips pulled into the slightest smirk. She was a redhead. He should have seen it wouldn't work out._

_The old cop sending her a grin, "The walking rule book marching among you feds now? He used to make us crazy, acting like he was in the Red Army or something." He shook his head, "Poor kid really needed to lighten up."_

_"_ Tony _?" Viv's mouth forming a perfect 'o'._

Who the hell was he? How could any one of them be blamed for not knowing even without cranial trauma? Even Gibbs wasn't omniscient, but mere mortals like Blackadder, Todd, McGee, David... they didn't have a fighting chance against a Legend. Spook speak (and Gibbs hated spooks), but that's what Tony was. He'd been undercover his entire life. Constructing personalities to infiltrate closed groups and maximise his efficacy as an operative. It was fucking terrifying. It was tragic. Most of all, it was damn irritating.

Did he know before? Did anyone else? Gibbs wasn't even sure who _he_ was, he didn't need this shit.

He watched McGee stare at his shoes for a long time, the expression on his face invisible except for the downward curl of his lip just barely discernible.

When the penitent rolled his chair back and wandered towards the stairwell, Gibbs silently followed. Transportation between floors had somehow become linked with uncomfortable truth, with sacred conference between the minds of his team and, unlike the elevator, the stairwell was always empty. A place fit for conversation with the self.

**.,.,;,;,;,0,;,;,;,.,.**

McGee was trapped in a particular corner of his mind as he wandered down the first flight of stairs and leaned against the cinder-block wall. Sighing, he slid down the wall to sit on the cold cement of the landing between the floors. Limbo. It suited his mood and he could be reasonably certain he wouldn't be interrupted.

_Wouldn't be here if you did, would you, DiNozzo?_

Why had he said that?

_"C'mon, Mcgee." Tony stood outside the circle of desks, his gun strapped tight to his torso by the shoulder holster he was wearing again after having switched to a standard issue hip holster for more than a year. His leather jacket was folded neatly over his arm and the collar stood up on his polo shirt. Artfully, not haphazardly. Tony could bear to dress down only so far. His truly casual outfits had disappeared with Kate and try as he might, his psyche seemed to rebel at the idea of his dressing like Gibbs. His unimpressive facsimile probably cost more than Gibbs' entire wardrobe._

_"C'mon?" McGee repeated, nonetheless strapping on his side-arm and casting about for his own coat. It was in a wrinkled heap on the floor. No one would ever accuse_ him _of effortless, fashionable perfection._

_"Let's get that drink."_

_Things had changed so much in a week. Things McGee had begun to think would never change._

_"Why?" he asked, no accusation or distrust in his tone. After the day he'd had at the firing range, he was willing to believe there was genuine professional concern motivating Tony. At least right now._

_"Because you need it." The lead agent's voice was heavier than it should have been on such a simple sentence. He was saying more than he was saying and he wanted McGee to know that he was saying more than he was saying without saying so. Tim almost wished he'd been right about Tony, if only because after two years of Gibbs it would have been such a relief to take orders from someone uncomplicated. For words to mean exactly what they were supposed to and nothing else._

_He'd never done well with poetic interpretation. His own writing tended to be either crisp and to the point or painfully purple. He resented Tony's ease for metaphor, his quick tongue for alliteration, his parallel trains of thought that defied physics by crossing paths. It came from his mind being sprawling and bent and running on logic not of this earth, but that was immaterial. On writing days, McGee honestly wished he could switch out his rational, linear mind for something a little more wild. Rarely, when leads slipped past him and were caught up by the creative thinking of his outside-the-box colleagues, he wished it on working days, too._

He didn't know why he said it. It's not like he thought it was true. He knew better now. He was just trying to give Tony back what Tony was always giving him, but it had gone horribly wrong somewhere between his brain and his mouth as things always did when he most wished they wouldn't. He didn't have a gift for off-the-cuff remarks, he didn't toe the line of sarcasm terribly well. He tended to say only exactly what he meant or to say things he'd never intended to say at all.

He had thought he was through running his mouth off and getting into trouble. He thought he'd finally grown out of it.

_"Where we going?" McGee looked across at Tony, whose eyes remained on the road as he fiddled with the radio and, exhausting stations but finding none to his liking, flicked it off in disgust. His long fingers found their way back to the gear stick and fidgeted around the ball like spider legs. Stillness seemed beyond him, as if surplus energy would seep from his pores if he just sat and drove the car._

_"Bar. It's walking distance from my place."_

_Surprised, McGee's eyes stopped following the distracting movements of Tony's hand and returned to his face. He found little expression there, just the serious, neutral set of eyebrows and mouth that meant Tony was either annoyed with you or conducting what he considered to be important business._

_Tony glanced over and there was the tiniest hint of anxiety in his eyes, "You're cool to bunk over right? I know the owner, I can put the car in his garage. He'll keep her safe." A slight smile._

_"Yeah, sure." McGee returned it with a tentative smile of his own. He should have known there would be plans in place for the precious Mustang. Tony had been pretty protective since the whole incident with the theft and spectacular televised death of his previous car. "I've just never been to your place before."_

_Tony swallowed some other comment before saying, "Well, we're fixing that aren't we, pro- Tim."_

It wasn't like he was a complete idiot. It wasn't like he didn't notice that Tony could cut the crap and really help him out. It's just that he made it so hard to remember he had done it after the situation passed. Like he wanted you to forget that he was ever there for you- _always_ there for you- that he was ever sympathetic, that he actually wasn't an asshole. That he was practically Team Gibbs' director of morale. It was just that the bad tended to overshadow the good, even though the good wasn't rare or exceptional. It just wasn't as memorable.

And McGee hadn't returned the favour in support. He knew he hadn't and he felt like a prize jerk.

He let himself be suckered in. He was smarter than this, but he _allowed_ it. The question was why? Why did that ridiculous con-artist feel the need to antagonise everyone around him into forgetting he was actually a good person (and a competent agent) and why did McGee keep letting him get away with it?

_Everyone in the bar seemed to know Tony, but they weren't greeting him like McGee had imagined Tony would be greeted in a bar. Mostly they nodded seriously, some of them smiled, but it was a warm smile, a smile of fellow-feeling and fondness rather than the conspiratorial grins and leers he had expected. It wasn't exactly the kind of place he'd expected, either. Quiet, dim, all old-fashioned wood and ox-blood-red leather that still carried a trace scent of cigar smoke from the old days of chain-smoking over a tumbler. There was also a guy who looked like a body-builder guarding a gun safe by the door._

_DiNozzo checked his weapons (service pistol, two knives, and a back-up) and turned to McGee. "Sam here is ex-CID. He doesn't think firearms go well with anything but sarsaparilla and I'm inclined to agree. We'll get them back tomorrow." He held out a hand for McGee's gun._

_McGee looked down at the extended hand and felt like he was getting involved in something hinky. "How many drinks do you think we'll have, Tony? We checking our badges, too?"_

_Tony grinned and it was genuine enough, familiar and vaguely comforting, "There's enough cops in here that it'll take more than federal ID for us to get into serious trouble. Guns, though? We'll definitely be getting_ _that_ _drunk."_

_Feeling like he was engaging in some kind of mysterious ritual, he drew his sig, pulled the clip and checked the chamber before crossing his new leader's palm with the butt of the freshly neutered weapon. "Okay, boss."_

_The grin returned and Tony clapped him on the shoulder a bit less roughly than usual before he turned to pass the gun on to 'Sam the ex-CID'. The impact of the blow still staggered McGee slightly and he looked around for anyone sniggering at his being caught off guard. No one seemed interested in him, though the waitress was studying Tony with speculation in her eyes._

_McGee was profoundly used to that. He went out with Tony, he went out with Gibbs, he went out with Ziva. He was surrounded by the physically exceptional, the striking, and his totally inoffensive ordinariness never registered with casual passers-by or the blur of witnesses and suspects they interviewed. He was all right with that most of the time. He was forgettable, could slip around unnoticed without ever exercising stealth: they couldn't. They had to hide in plain sight by deliberately drawing every scrap of attention or they had to make sure no one ever saw them at all._

_Of course, McGee wasn't much for undercover work, Tony was probably the best in NCIS, Ziva could sneak up on a ninja without even trying, and Gibbs was Gibbs; so there were holes in his theory._

"McGee?"

He started and stared at the platform shoes and knee-high stockings which seemed to fill his vision. "Why are you taking the stairs?" he addressed the kneecaps.

"It's creepy in here and no one ever does. Why are _you_?" Abby's voice conveyed about the same level of bemused wonderment as if she'd found him wearing a pink tutu and a gorilla mask.

He looked down at his hands and watched his fingers curl around each other, "I said something pretty crappy and I guess I just... I just wanted to figure out why."

_They sat at a booth tucked away in the corner of the bar. Tony smiled vacantly at the waitress, gently brushing off her flirting and securing a stream of alcohol for both of them without leading her on or crushing her hopes. It was like a dance. For once, McGee found himself actually impressed by the DiNozzo charm. Usually, it was more like the DiNozzo smarm._

_"To the newest semi-probationary senior field agent at NCIS." Tony tipped his glass up and put his free hand over his heart, adding with overwrought faux-solemnity, "And absent friends."_

_McGee drank the toast, the strong gin and tonic sliding down easy. He really did need a drink after the week he'd had, and if he had to suffer through Tony's idea of male bonding to get it, so be it._

_Four drinks later, he suddenly wondered at that toast. Absent friends. They weren't just saying that, were they? Kate. And now Gibbs. Absent friends. He was more than a bit drunk. He had his suspicions there wasn't much tonic in these drinks and while it took a whole lot of alcohol for him to get silly, his inhibitions went down pretty quick. He'd never managed to break himself of his habit for blurting out everything in his mind the second his defences were breached. Nervousness, alcohol, excitement; he talked it all out. Some might say babbled, but that offended his dignity. He did no such thing._

_"You really meant that," he giggled, pointing at his drink._

_Tony blinked at him owlishly, as if he were speaking in tongues, but his eyes were still lucid and sparkling. They were about the same height, but muscle-mass was an unfair advantage in drinking. That was why men could (usually) hold more than women, McGee had it in his notes from his last forensic toxicology lecture. Tony probably also had an increased tolerance because of his many years as a frat boy. Obviously that only stopped intoxication, not impairment. He still had those notes somewhere. Colour-coded. His mother insisted it saved hours come exam time, but you couldn't know for sure without a larger sample size._

_"The forensic toxicologist who lectured my class at FLETC had this amazing accent," McGee said seriously, leaning over the table towards Tony, "Amazing. I have no idea where he was from."_

_"He's Filipino and you're lucky he wasn't lecturing in Tagalog. He practically was when I went there. The note-taking situation was complex." Tony downed a triple shot of pure malt whiskey like it was Kool-Aid and reached for another. And another.  
_

_Now McGee's eyes were owlish, "How many languages do you speak?"_

_"Just three," Tony said, gesturing in the negative more aggressively than necessary, though the 'just' made McGee feel a little inadequate. "English, Italian, and Spanish. Just three, I'm not_ Ziva. _Well. I could probably figure out a lot of French if someone made me. Romance languages, you know. What do I really mean?"_

_"Oh, about absent friends." McGee fiddled with his glass and felt his heart sink, sobriety returning, "It's just something people say. Or, it was. For me, you know. I never meant it before."_

_Tony looked across at him and it was like sitting opposite a stranger, his face was so changed by the shadow of bitterness which crossed it. "I've never not meant it. In some way, Tim, I mean most of the stupid shit I say. I'm just not usually having the same conversation as the person I'm talking to."_

_McGee studied the lengthy trail of empty shot glasses beside his superior and knew, with certainty, that Tony was now far, far more drunk than he was. That he'd evidently_ intended _to be more drunk more quickly than McGee could possibly match. And he realised that DiNozzo seemed far more sober drunk than he ever had actually sober._

_Apparently, the one person who had never given him a straight answer to any question he had ever asked was in the mood to tell him things. Candid things. To let him see behind the curtain. McGee pushed his drink away. He wanted to remember this._

"What did you say?" Abby was all sympathy. Her soft, white hand on his knee as she crouched down, her green eyes rimmed in thick black eye-liner wide with concern and ready understanding. She was beautiful. She wouldn't be on his side, not when he told her. Her emotional state had been delicate these past few months, the full force of her considerable capacity for smothering love and her bone-deep protective streak swinging their power between the absent Gibbs and the ever-present DiNozzo. Tony was always high on her list, second in rank only to Gibbs himself as in all things, but she had developed something of a complex about him since her first favourite fled to Mexico.

She'd become even more possessive, for one. She didn't allow criticism, for two. Not that she ever really had, McGee reflected with only a tiny hint of bitterness. She definitely wasn't like that about him. Possessive, sure, but criticism she was more likely to join in on than put a stop to, she'd even joined in on the hazing.

He rubbed his forehead, "I told Tony he wasn't good enough to lead a team."

Her dark red lips pulled tightly downwards and her hand withdrew from his knee.

"I know," he said, sighing heavily, "it's the wrong time, it was below the belt. I know."

Abby sat down, across the landing, away from him, "So why did you say it?"

_"Why do you like to go undercover so much?"_

_The non-sequitur seemed to amuse Tony, he chuckled as he spun his whiskey glass. It was a dangerous chuckle, there was danger in his fingers, and McGee was suddenly, uncomfortably aware of the fact that stripping someone like Tony of his weapons did not render him safe. "It's an escape, Mc...Tim. TimGee. It's an escape. I get to be someone else for a while,_ gracias a Christo."

 _McGee frowned deeply, "Why would_ you _want to be someone else?"_

 _And now there was full-out laugh. A disturbing laugh that unsettled McGee's stomach and stirred his brain, reminding him of the unpleasant feeling he'd had around Tony when they first met, that feeling of always having missed something. "Why_ wouldn't _I?"_

 _"You've got everything," Tim argued, suddenly fierce, "You've_ got _everything!"_

 _Tony smirked at him, his eyelids at half-mast, "I got nothing. You think the right name, the money that isn't mine, or the right bone-structure really counts for anything when you go_ contro la famiglia _? I could've coasted, that's what no one seems to get. I could have coasted on my family, done whatever the old bastard wanted and come out crown prince of the financial district, I could have coasted on my name just by being someone they approved of- doing nothing at all with my life would have been enough-, fuck, if nothing else, I could have coasted on my looks. I could've been an Italian gigolo furniture mover. I could've, it's true. But I picked the one field where not only did it all_ not matter, _they_ held it against me. _They hold it against you, probie."_

_Whiskey disappeared down his throat and Tony pointed with the empty glass at nothing in particular. His rare gesticulations were increasing in wildness, but otherwise his stillness was incredible. McGee had never seen a living person move less and he wanted to fidget under the force of that slightly hazy gaze. "Cops hate Italians. They really hate rich Italians with a name known all over creation. More than anything, though, they hate a pretty boy. They hate book-smart cadets and they hate pretty boys."_

_"Two outta three ain't bad?" McGee attempted to joke._

_Tony just grinned lop-sidedly, showing all his teeth._

_Deflating into stillness of his own, McGee stared across the table and wondered what the point of it all was. "What did you get your Masters in, anyway? I always wondered." He was feeling defensive._

_"Behavioural Science."_

_That probably explained a lot, but McGee wasn't sure any more. "I need to get mine before they can officially promote me to senior agent."_

_"Yep."_

_He didn't want to think too much about it, he'd cross that bridge when he came to it. Right now it wasn't doable and Director Sheppard was generous with grace periods. Education brought up the other bomb DiNozzo had left in his brain. "How on earth did you make it through four years of military school? Didn't you try to bust out? Make all your buddies watch The Great Escape and dig a tunnel?" He laughed, but nothing was really funny._

_"Nope." Tony smiled and_ his _amusement was genuine. "I loved military school."_

"I don't know, Abby," he kicked against the floor, "I was just so _mad_. I was so angry with him. It's that stupid nickname, I don't know why it still bugs me so much, but all of a sudden- after not hearing it for months- I just wasn't gonna take it. I know he doesn't mean it like... I know he's just bugging me. He doesn't get that I'm not like him. I got enough teasing in school to last me forever, thanks."

Abby studied him, "It's like 'Abs' or 'boss' or 'Katie' or 'Timmy', McGee. It's love." She pouted intently at him, "It means you're part of the family."

"Maybe to you guys, but not to me. I mean, didn't you notice that I'm a little less than completely confident in myself as a field agent? That maybe-"

She held up an interrupting hand that would suffer no disobedience, "I've been watching and for the last four months, that didn't seem like a big issue to me, Timmy. In fact, you've been merrily taking initiative, following up your own leads and goofing off when boss-man's not looking left and right. Sometimes he still called you probie, I heard him, and _you_ would _smile_. Or you'd punch him in the metaphoric gut and he'd have to threaten you with pain and unemployment, but that's tantamount to a hug among field agents." She grinned nostalgically. "How come there weren't more campfires in the lab? I love campfires. I even have marshmallows."

McGee shook his head, smiling ruefully, "I don't think the boss would let you roast them inside, Abby. Tony doesn't need another unexplainable Bunsen burner incident in his file."

They both realised what he'd said at the same time and a look was exchanged.

"Tim," she said, not letting him weasel away from her searching gaze, "are you happy Gibbs is back?"

"Of course I am." And he was. They all had Gibbs on a pedestal, they all looked up to him, they were all awed by his powers, his Gibbsness. But there was a but.

"I'm sensing a but," Abby echoed his thoughts. Her face was open and so was her body language, it didn't seem like she was about to pounce on him for his reservations about the return of her hero. Looks could be deceiving and McGee felt like crossing his legs was probably a good idea as a precautionary measure.

 _"You_ loved _it?" McGee stared at this alien creature. "How can you_ love _military school?"_

 _"It was fantastic. They told you exactly what they wanted: when to get up, how to dress, how to act, and they meant exactly what they said. If you didn't do it they showed you why you should." Tony's tone had shifted slightly, but McGee couldn't place it, "Punishment was always consistent, always fit the crime. I'd fucking love to do twenty laps for tardiness and have that be the end of it instead of getting the stink stare and a silent guilt trip. That 'you_ know _what you did' crap can go on for years."_

_Sceptical, McGee raised an eyebrow, "You liked being told what to do all the time?"_

_"No," Tony twirled a shot glass between his fingers, "I liked having a place and knowing what it was."_

"I never quite got used to Gibbs. I mean, I was used to him, but I never..."

"Loved him?" Abby still didn't sound angry. She sounded like she'd been expecting this.

McGee made a face, "Well, I wouldn't have put it like that, but I guess so."

She nodded knowingly. "You liked it when he was nice."

"Yeah, and you and Tony didn't. I remember." He twiddled his thumbs. "And now we're back to the status quo."

Abby's face lit up and she came forward onto her knees, "Timmy! That's it!"

"What?"

"The reason you're angry with Tony," she raised her arms triumphantly. "He called you probie and you feel like you're back on square one, all that progress gone. Like you spent four months working for him and doing your best to be a good senior field agent and now it's all for naught because he's back where he was and you'll have to go back where you were. He's being who he always used to be before and you don't like it, do you?"

McGee's face contorted, trying to follow her, outraged at her, realising she was on the right track all at once. "He didn't stop it," was all he said.

Abby crawled over and pulled him into a crushing hug, patting his head, "He didn't protect you, the new team, we trusted him to be our boss and now he's not. He let Gibbs take us all through the time machine. I get why it sucks. I get it."

His fingers curled around her arm and he found himself squeezing her, "I never noticed how much happier I was."

She didn't flinch under the pressure, "'Cause Tony can be pretty scary, but he just doesn't inspire pathological fear like Leroy Jethro Gibbs."

_Tony's smile was strange, his eyes unfocused; he was truly, truly drunk. "It was what I'd always wanted."_

"Nope," Tim agreed, sighing into her skin, "he's too human."

**.,.,;,;,;,0,;,;,;,.,.**

Gibbs let the stairwell door close.


	8. Counterpoint: Leroy and David

8: Counterpoint 2: Leroy and David

.

In the first instance of life playing directly into his hand for way too long, it just so happened he was already in the elevator when Ziva stepped aboard, swivelled to face the doors and folded her hands right over left. She looked at him and nodded solemnly in greeting, but the reflex of a smile she couldn't suppress made obvious her awkward pleasure that he was back lurking in NCIS elevators instead of Mexican cantinas.

He gathered his thoughts for a few seconds, feeling her barely perceptible emotional ticks and her fiercely contained joy and not liking it for reasons he couldn't quite figure. Not that he'd ever really tried to justify instinctive dislike, he found it worked better to assume his gut had a good reason and get on from there. He hit the emergency stop and turned to face Ziva's expectant interest, thinking he'd damn well better get some answers he already knew or he might as well go back to Mexico.

"Ziva."

"Jethro."

He wasn't sure how he felt about her use of his given name. He thought he probably knew before, probably had a real good rationale for why the whole thing he had with Ziva was no big deal, but the explosions still blurred together and sometimes he wasn't sure he was even in the right decade. Not the most important problem right now.

"Why'd you call me?" he cut straight to it, no bullshit, so sentiment. Feelings got him into this mess, but they sure as hell wouldn't get him out.

She didn't pretend not to instantly know what he was talking about, but she never wavered, never blinked. "I required assistance."

Gibbs leaned closer, crowding her, "But why did you call _me_?"

Her eyes, huge and dark, always reflecting sparks of light against their blackness, gave her a quality of old fashioned melodrama. Even at her most fierce, she almost looked on the verge of tears. Staring up at him, her face taut with withheld emotions, she seemed so fragile, and he clamped down on an impulse to drop it and tell her it was all understood. He may understand, that's what he needed to know, and he was going to find out no matter how much her eyes begged him to let it all pass.

He'd let too much pass with her already.

Sensing the shift of his mood against her, Ziva's mouth twisted and her gaze dropped away. "You had nothing left to lose. Tony- the team- they were still federal agents, under orders. In Mossad we do not compromise a commanding officer with our... personal difficulties."

"Yeah?" he said, conversationally, more as a form of punctuation than question or affirmation.

Ziva shifted her weight, but her face was motionless, her tell-all eyes shuttered from view. "Yes."

"That the only reason?"

She swept a hand over her loose hair, her little finger slightly twitchy as it dragged through the curls, "Need there be another?"

He tilted his head and studied her again, no particular thought or emotion in mind, knowing she'd cave before she'd be the first to look away.

"No, it is not the only reason." Ziva enunciated each word sharply, resentfully. "Tony does not trust me as you do."

Gibbs was actually stunned, enough that it must have shown clearly on his face, because she leaned up towards him, her finger pointed emphatically.

"He has not the _cause_ that you do," she defended with an air of being the only person in the room listening to reason.

Gibbs put a hand on her shoulder, so genuinely taken by surprise that physical contact seemed necessary to establish the moment's reality. "You really didn't think he'd go to bat for you?"

Ziva shook her head, exasperated, "I knew he would."

He squeezed her slightly, unconsciously, hating that once again, he was failing to see the big picture where the whole book used to be open to him. "What, then?"

"You are..." her hands stopped mid-gesture and she looked down at them, simmering on the edge of a dangerous honesty. "My father blocked every escape, turned everything I knew against me; everything I could have used to help myself. And I was taught... I was _trained_ that there is no one to be trusted, no one but family is worthy of the smallest confidence. I was afraid... that they might... they might... and no one but Mossad is competent. My father taught me that, too."

Gibbs fell back against the wall, away from her subtle anguish, away from her demands on him. He felt old. "Uh huh."

Prim and wound up, Ziva seemed even younger, her upturned face surrounded by a halo of soft curls making her look like a child in need of protection. "Tony could not have pulled me out and I cannot trust him with... with anything my father touches. With what my life has been, will be again. He sees the world too brightly, he's an-an-an-"

"Idealist."

"Yes. An idealist. He hides it, but it is obvious. _You_ have made yourself family to me." The heaviness of the word- _family-_ left no doubt, as if there could have been any, that she wasn't using it in the strictly traditional sense. "I could call only on family in such a time."

Gibbs huffed out a breath. He knew about family, knew all about keeping a part of yourself away from prying eyes, but there was more. His instincts weren't up to their old sharpness yet, but he could tell that much. "That so?"

"That is so."

"Why do you resent him?" Gibbs ran his fingers along the rail around the elevator car, his off-handedness a play that made Ziva itch to move. Her professionalism wouldn't allow her to crack seriously, but she was still very young no matter how much she tried to pretend she wasn't, and he had her at an eternal disadvantage. She was so much more vulnerable than he remembered she was, he'd been too side-tracked, forgotten she was an alienated child as well as a hardened weapon. Still, _her_ bizarre dichotomies were relatively simple compared to the subject of his question.

She stared at him, her mouth set in a disapproving line, "I do not."

"Don't waste my time, Ziva," he snapped, getting irritated, "we've got work to do and I'm tired of trying to play shrink. What happened to make this team so... What changed?"

"You left!" she said, in a harsh whisper, her nostrils flaring in impatience. "What did you expect? Everything changed. Tony became insufferable, McGee became annoying, Abby became ridiculous, Ducky became angry, and I have tried to adjust. I think that I did, that we all did. Tony is a good leader even when he is being impossible, and he has made me a better investigator because he explains his actions. Too much, it is true, but still, I am grateful. I have never had a superior like him and I have learned. McGee trying to replace him, because Tony could not be what he was when he was not the leader, was very igravating-"

"Aggravating."

"That, too. -but it caused him to bloom as a field agent, to look at things another way. We did not sit in a circle and wait for your return. We did not think it was coming. It was a terrible thing for us, but it was good also. Glad as I am you have come back, I cannot be sorry to have learned, to have seen the team become stronger."

He wondered if it was too much like neediness, too much like weakness, to wonder now if he had been wrong to think they were always hoping he'd come back. "But you wanted me back." Fuck it.

Ziva drew a deep breath and pinned him with a weirdly gentle glare, "I did. We speak the same language, yes? And the others, Tony, they never will. For this and for your help, for _all_ your help, I will always be grateful."

They nodded at each other in mutual understanding, but his gut was still churning. He'd been right about Ziva, mostly, and that was a damn start, but there was a whole lot she still wasn't telling him. A whole lot he wasn't ever going to know if he couldn't get _one_ of them to explain what had gone on the four months he'd been away.

"And DiNozzo?" he asked, fishing for the insight she'd neatly avoided giving.

Ziva seemed startled that he wasn't finished, but she rolled with it. "I did not mean I do not trust him, he was a faithful commander. And we all survived, did we not?"

He shrugged.

"I think that is the tip, yes?" She hit the stop button again and the car lurched into motion.

"The point," Gibbs muttered as she slipped out on the first floor, apparently not caring where she was as long as he could ask her no more questions. "The point."

When he stepped out of the elevator it was to be almost bulldozed by Agent Lee coming quickly the other direction and looking over her shoulder rather than where she was going. He slid aside and she only knocked his arm, spinning as her thick legal binders were nearly flung from her grasp. They faced each other, wide-eyed.

"Sir, I am so-"

"Don't apologise," Gibbs curtly silenced her fluster. "Just don't do it again."

Maybe he shouldn't be spreading that philosophy around, because it didn't seem to work as well for him as it had for the Duke. Still, he couldn't help thinking he was too old now to change. He'd see. If everyone else could change, if his whole world could change, maybe there'd be no other choice.

Maybe an apology was okay, if it was between friends. Between equals.

Maybe he actually had a few more of those than he'd ever admitted to.

After all, it was hard to be the lonely hero when there were all these people who would rather die than let him go it alone.

**.,.,;,;,;,0,;,;,;,.,.**

Ziva lifted her head to discover where her aimless wandering had brought her and found her hand on the receiving door to autopsy from the garage. She recalled that there were no active cases involving cadavers, that Palmer was off this week to study for an exam, that Ducky would be alone catching up on paperwork. She wondered how aimless her wandering had really been.

She marched in, allowing her footsteps to resonate on the sterile tile so the good doctor would not be startled. He was seated at the far end of the room, his head bent over a stack of requisitions, and his light brown hair falling forward in a fringe against his glasses.

"May I speak to you, Doctor?" she more announced than asked.

Ducky swirled awkwardly, clearly surprised in spite of her efforts, and turned his chair around when he saw who was come. "Ziva, of course, what-"

"Was I wrong?"

He blinked at her, all sweetly open expression and befuddlement. "About what, my dear?"

She spun in place, wanting to watch his reactions, but not wanting to face him, feeling as foolish as she always did trying to have these 'discussions' about her emotions. Only with Ducky could she manage as far as a few painful half-confessions. "To call Gibbs."

Ducky put his hands on his knees, and he looked so capable, not at all frail or old, that she was comforted. "Rather than Anthony, you mean."

"Yes." Ziva nodded, tense as a bow-string. His good opinion mattered to her. She hated that such an embarrassing weakness had arisen in her character, but it had and there was no undoing it now. She cared.

"I think we all understand why you did it, Ziva," he soothed, using his eminently reasonable, Edinburgh Medical voice, "none of us blames-"

She barged into his personal space, putting her hands on his shoulders, "But was it _wrong_ , Ducky?"

He met her desperate gaze calmly, his large blue eyes full of kindness. "It would depend upon your perspective, my dear. I would say that _rightness_ or _wrongness_ is out of place in such a nebulous decision. It was necessary for you and it is not for anyone to say it was wrong. That puts too fine a point on it."

Ziva sighed and dragged herself over to the other side of the room. "Thank you for not answering _yes_ , Doctor Mallard, but it would have saved time."

Ducky smiled slightly. "It seems to me that you already had an answer. Why ask me at all?"

"Hope?" She smiled back ruefully. "I should have trusted my team, right? I know. It is not all about that, Ducky, I really did want to protect them. They do not know my world and I would not want them to."

He stood and went to his cupboard to collect the tea things, setting out two mugs. "I think you underestimate the worldliness of your team-mates. You might find they are very clearly aware of the things you have had to face and run from, Ziva, and that they have accepted you regardless, not in ignorance."

She chewed her lip in silence.

Ducky filled the electric kettle and plugged it in. "I take it you've been speaking to Jethro?"

She murmured in the positive.

"Tell me," he began, gently taking her arm and leading her to a chair, "Did he ask you about these months he's been away?"

She nodded as she sat, not quite willing to commit to the turn of topic.

"About how we got on?" Ducky persisted.

"I think perhaps he is as confused about his leaving and his coming back as we are, Doctor." Ziva did not like to psychoanalyse Gibbs, or anyone at all- particularly herself, but it had been a strange conversation in the elevator and their newly restored leader had definitely been after some bit of higher knowledge. As if there were one answer she could have given that would make it all fall into place for him. She doubted it.

The pathologist hummed something disapproving.

Ziva raised her eyebrows.

Ducky seemed just the tiniest bit smug, "I don't think it is himself he's confused about, Officer David."

She leaned back thoughtfully as he got up to tend to the whistling kettle.

"No," Ducky said serenely, handing her a steaming mug, "I think our so lately wayward Agent Gibbs has realised that though heavy hangs the head that wears the crown, heavier still is the naked brow that bears its weight but not its substance. Sugar?"


	9. Tony

9\. Tony

.

It probably wasn't that Gibbs was a sociopath.

That really probably wasn't it. It was a feelings thing and Tony was generally very accepting of the fact that Gibbs had trouble expressing his feelings to people he was still in charge of who weren't named Abby. Now _former_ agents, Gibbs was all P-D-A up the A-S-S. If you caught the drift. If you were buying what was selling. If you were picking up what was being put down. If-

Okay, he was tired of that now.

But it almost definitely wasn't that Gibbs was a sociopath. That was what needed to be firmly established. Surely there was some complex, lonely hero, ex-marine, amnesia-sufferer, done-got-blowed-up-twice kind of explanation. Well, not that last one, because this wasn't really a new thing and Gibbs had only been blown up once when he started his apparently long-term project to fuck with Tony's head.

Actually, maybe it was worth backing up. _Was_ Gibbs a sociopath?

Eventually there did come a point where it had to be an open question, particularly since at any given moment of his day, Tony might have seriously wavered on the answer. In the old days he would almost certainly have been more optimistic, would have cheerfully said that Gibbs was at least a _well-meaning_ sociopath. If he was indeed, etc.

Now he was feeling less glib about it. Now, on especially bad days, he was starting to really fucking mean it. Sometimes he tried to tell himself the old man was just real mixed up, that he had genuinely forgotten some of the nuances of his old relationships, forgotten some of the insights to which he had been privy, and that he genuinely didn't realise how shitty he was being. Other times Gibbs didn't allow him the luxury of that illusion, he was far too on the damn nose to be stumbling around unintentionally.

Tony knew when he was being knocked down a peg. It was a feeling with which he was thoroughly familiar.

What he didn't get- well, one of the many things he didn't get- was _why_ , exactly. Sure, he'd gotten used to being in charge, he could hardly have been a half-decent leader if he didn't, but he couldn't see how it would be fair to say he'd got a swelled head. Gibbs knew that was one problem he didn't actually have (though he tried to convince everyone he did, he acknowledged that his skills as a con-artist did not usually extend that far for very long), Gibbs had seen too many anxious looks, Gibbs knew too much about Baltimore, about Peoria, about military school. This was why he only stayed places for two years (this and extenuating circumstances), because people eventually picked up the pattern and some of them even realised when he was telling the truth. Then there were problems. Like that Tony had told Gibbs some things that surprised even him, and he used to think Gibbs had a better handle on the whole mess that was his life than he did. Not that that was a particularly high bar.

Then again, there had been moments from the very beginning that belied his cosy assumptions about Gibbs' understanding. That belied assumptions of even casual, first-degree friendship. In fact, that shit belied basic human decency at times. Like, Tony wasn't under any illusions about what a lot of people thought of him, he cultivated those impressions deliberately (he was a method actor), but Gibbs was supposed to be something different, Gibbs was supposed to get him. His captains had always got him, back in the good gone days on the force. His co-workers hated his guts, because making detective when he did amounted to a slap in the face to everyone who wasn't him and they were unfamiliar with the fact that he was actually good at something (one thing), but captains knew good no matter how dysfunctional it was.

Good enough to flout the unwritten rules (and some of the written ones) that said detectives had to do long, hard time as grunts, earning their stripes, getting their personalities whittled into standard gallows-humouriffic alcoholic curmudgeon shape. The guys who retired patrolmen hated detectives who were forty-five for being upstarts, the way they felt about one who was twenty-eight, words could not describe. The fact that he took out half the Baltimore mob on a long-shot and nearly single-handed was not even part of the equation. They figured, with his name and his family, he had an in on that brand of scum-bag. He didn't, but who ever let reality interfere with shitting on a man's reputation?

What the hell was he thinking about again?

Oh, yeah. Like he was ever thinking about anything else these days.

But Gibbs had seen him in Baltimore, he'd seen the situation. That was his point. The whole reason he was now a federal agent was that Gibbs had understood who he was, what he was: he'd thought. If that wasn't it, he really couldn't explain the fact that he had a job. _He_ wouldn't hire him, not if he didn't know at least two of the other hims, if you knew what he meant. It was one thing to play an occasionally hyper-competent but mostly useless dick on TV, it was something else to actually be one. It was something else to hire an ageing child without looking behind the curtain. Something else entirely to put real power in the hands of a shallow braggart with no smarts- and there were definitely times when it seemed like that's what Gibbs thought he had done.

And Tony wasn't taking responsibility for that, because a man who knew when Special Ops-trained, combat hardened marines were lying to him should be able to pick up on the wiles of a sleazy street cop promoted over a decade before his time.

He was wondering about it, if maybe the fact that fast-tracking had ruined some of his other lives was more of a factor in his decision to stay this time than he had previously accounted for. It was the combination of his unnecessarily high education and his fucked-up childhood that gave him the leg-up on this job to fast-track in the first place, so the list of things involved that he didn't want anyone to think about too hard was kinda long. Gibbs knew something about both of those things, but he didn't seem to make the connections the way you'd expect for the Corps' answer to Sherlock Holmes. The explanation for that would have to be that Gibbs didn't notice unimportant things, and what else was Tony so long as he was holding his end up on the job?

He really was worried about the old man though, in spite of everything, in spite of Gibbs' obvious confidence that there was no cause for concern- a confidence which lately had extended to a swift kick in the figurative balls every time Tony tried to cover his ass for him. And Gibbs' ass had needed a lot of covering. He was still a nineties Gibbs, a Gibbs that was nicer and more human, more vulnerable and more willing to actually listen and talk to people instead of just waiting them out and asking if they were done. As interesting as that was, as almost irresistible as that was for someone who was borderline pathologically nosy, it was also causing the second B to be more of a _goddamned fucking B_ in compensation and that shit was getting old. Tony could take an awful lot of crap, but he used to believe that there was a reason for most of it; now he wasn't so sure.

See, one of the unfortunate side-effects of being team leader for a real length of time- long enough for them all to stop believing it was an interim thing, no matter how much they were denying that to themselves now- was that it had humanised the boss. And with humanity came flaws. Tony wasn't so quick to look for mythical, awe-ful explanations for the machinations of the Great and Powerful Gibbs, because he'd been in those boots for real now and he saw the tricks, the tragedy, the crushing pressure. He'd seen the necessity of the uplifting support of a team with real faith in you. Because before the Mexican pirate's appearance, that _was_ what they had. They'd been a team and they had thrived. Now he wondered what he'd done to crash and burn so badly in his last week as boss that they were ecstatic to give up what they'd built for themselves.

Had he been that bad or was Gibbs really that much better? He didn't actually believe in the faultless savant he found himself lauding to other people. He remembered now that he had once seen the man's failings, had once been pretending to live in unquestioning fear of some awesome criminal investigative god descended from Valhalla both to tweak the boss and instil fear in the gullible. When did he stop pretending? Stop teasing and testing? It wasn't like he ever thought Gibbs was omnipotent, he was a semi-functional adult and there may well be baggage, but there was not full-blown psychosis. They wouldn't let him carry a weapon if there were.

But a time had come- when Kate died?- that they all stopped questioning. She used to tell him he followed blindly, that he never questioned, but it wasn't true. He didn't question _in front of her_. In front of her, before McGee came around, he and Gibbs were unified and without crack. She'd been odd man out and it was important that she was because Kate always had to try to be the best and brightest, she was so afraid of being seen to come up short- they had to knock her down so she could learn. It was when she started coming into her own that Gibbs had drifted up onto Mount Olympus and become untouchable, that Tony now recalled himself beginning to believe his own press. There'd been a time when he knew very, very well that Gibbs subscribed to something of a black and grey morality. It was hard to determine when and why he started getting so many stars in his eyes.

Of course the subsequent rude awakening could be nailed to the very second, and he wasn't the only one left burdened by fresh clarity of vision. Poor Abs, poor Ziva. McGee was all right. McGee, who so doubted his capacity for strength, was the only one who could just as easily stand alone as with their support. He'd never be a solo operative, but he was self-reliant where it counted. Sometimes Anthony fiercely envied him that.

There was no time for envy, though. He'd had precious few hours to pull his shit together before he had to be the hardest rock he knew how to be, to get them all back in the game and beat them up and patch them up and shore them up- to never let them down. With only Ducky not so blind sided by the abandonment, not so busy mourning that he couldn't be angry, and with only Ducky who did not unconditionally forgive when the prodigal leader returned.

And it wasn't like he didn't understand: he was happy Gibbs was back, too. He missed the old prick keenly when he wasn't around and cranial trauma or not, there was still a lot to be learned from him. Tony still looked up to him. He did regret acting on the impulse that he needed extraneous help to get Ziva out of her Code Crazy frame-up situation, because holy shit it pissed him off when Gibbs considered it _Tony's_ personal failure that Ziva felt the need to call Gibbs in to be the cavalry and he couldn't, in good conscience, make a smart-ass remark about it. He regretted even more being such a simpering wimp, letting fugitives and beach bums take the reins of _his_ wagon train. Sure, it was his responsibility that Ziva was in trouble because she was his and everything that touched her was his problem- he bought that Gibbs-logic, because that was how he rolled too- but suddenly Mr. Do I Look Like Your Boss? is running missions and Good-Jobbing Abby and generally sure as hell acting like his boss.

Displaced again and no comedy stylings to fall back on. Could he fault himself for getting confused?

Absolutely. He should have long since dealt with the bullshit that let Gibbs pull his strings like that. He should have at least remembered that he was in charge.

Tony talked himself in circles about the job he did those four months. He'd been so close to honest as team leader, closer than he'd ever been with any of them. He really didn't think there was any other way to do it, not that would work. These people were good, they needed sincerity so they could lean on him without suspicion that he'd take advantage. At the same time, they were so thoroughly indoctrinated on the mask they never stopped seeing it even when he stopped wearing it. Agent Lee probably thought they were all insane, and he really wouldn't blame her if she did. Speaking of which, that was another thing that pissed him off: she earned her shot at field training and even if she probably wasn't cut out for it, she deserved to finish her term. You never knew when the meek would inherit the badass.

But here they all were, dumped, bumped, demoted, and he, at least, was listening to some really choice shit talking about the whole thing. Especially from the people he'd threatened with bodily harm and crime scene clean-up duty after the office beat downs on McGee got started. Even someone as well-liked as the geekozoid was going to get stick for moving from being a probie at the top of the washout deadpool to the senior special agent on the MCRT. Tony knew the deadpoolers were out of luck anyway- Timmy wouldn't be quitting field work for years to come- but Tony was also a pragmatist and they were right that his future ultimately wasn't in it. McGee would never be a team leader. One day he'd have to explain to the kid why there wasn't anything wrong with that. Preferably a day when McGee wasn't telling him the same thing.

Talk about on the nose. He seemed to be taking knock-outs from all comers.

The doorbell rang. Tony stared at it from his position at the breakfast bar which separated his tiny kitchen from the slightly larger living room. He'd had a real good rambling brood on, so his best guess was it was about zero four hundred and either this was McGee with a Batsignal or a wandering drunk. Or he was thinking too loud and he'd woken his neighbour to the left who could hear a pin drop in the parking lot from the roof. Kind of a princess and the pea thing.

Drunks could be good company for this sort of mood. Familiar, comforting. He got up to open the door.

When it was Gibbs and his moustache on the other side, he felt so damn tired he seriously considered just closing it again. There was a lot of total disregard for consequences going around, why shouldn't he jump on the bandwagon? Maybe he'd get fired and he could get a nice cushy job defusing pipe bombs for the NSA. De-stress a bit.

But who was he kidding. How often did he actually let his temper out? Never. That's how often.

"Hey," he said blandly, stepping out of the way and letting the door swing further into the apartment. He dropped his eyes, muttering, "There's beer in the fridge," as he walked away and slumped onto the couch, giving no shit if Gibbs followed him inside or not.

Trying to protect the man (and the man's man, Mike the fucker Franks: that old lush wasn't holding evidence, he was holding a PhD in bullshit- Tony felt like a rookie idiot for not picking that up a hell of a lot sooner) had left him apathetic and exhausted. He'd over done it with the slapstick on the case, he'd been sloppy, but the team hadn't noticed that Gibbs was not Gibbs and they hadn't noticed that there was a touch of bitter bad acting about Tony's carelessness so he counted it as a win. As long as the screw ups weren't real, it was a win. Getting pistol-whipped by his partner's mentor, that was a loss too profound to soberly contemplate, but it was his loss and his losses didn't count.

"You falling apart, DiNozzo?" Gibbs was taking up _that tone_ again, as if he'd caught the naughty puppy sulking over being disciplined. Maybe he actually thought they hadn't figured it out and that Tony felt guilty the crusty old drunk had been 'kidnapped'.

"Not one bit, boss. I have never been better, boss."

"Yeah?" Gibbs sat on the coffee table in front of him, keeping the high ground, "Last time you said that you were lying."

"I will be sure to let you know if I ever get the black plague again, boss."

Gibbs grunted with disapproval. "You think I'm going to forget who I am if you don't keep reminding me?"

Tony grinned darkly, "The thought has crossed my mind. You got a little confused on the Paulsen case- for a second there you thought I was you."

That had stuck in his craw so bad, that _You're the boss_ , because no, no he wasn't. Not with Gibbs wandering in and telling everyone he wasn't back at the same time that he started acting exactly like he was and that _You're the boss_ , that was the whole clusterfuck in a nutshell, wasn't it? The sarcasm, the condescension, the sheer balls of it- how dare he make a suggestion? Hadn't he learned by now not to think independently? The part that was the worst about it? It was true, he had rank or jurisdiction over everyone in the room and somehow he was still the patsy. Whose fault was that?

There was a heavy sigh, Gibbs voice was worn and low, "Some things... clearer than others."

Now he just felt like a jerk. Here he was baiting a man with six kinds of concussion who'd recently relived the worst thing in his life with a room full of strangers harassing him about old times he didn't remember and terrorists he couldn't recognise. Of course, that slack Tony was cutting him was still running out, because he remembered enough- more than enough.

"Jen says you did good." Gibbs was clearly fishing.

"Kept your seat warm for you." _The King isn't dead! Death to the Regent!_

Gibbs sat across from him in silence, those chilling eyes of his on the floor. He worried his lip with his first two fingers and he looked like he wished he'd bothered to get that beer before starting up this inevitably excruciating conversation.

"Did my best," Tony said. He hated himself for adding that, for still wanting validation, absolution.

"Don't know what you needed me for."

Was that a crack in the unshakeable, unbreakable, invincible confidence of Leroy Jethro Gibbs? Was that Gibbs really, honestly _doubting_ he was the very best thing ever to happen to law enforcement? It couldn't be. "You had your moments. Every few years."

Gibbs stared for a long time, troubled but reticent as almost always. Finally he propped a hand under his chin and said, "Why'd you stay, Tony?"

"You don't know? I was hoping one of us did."

"I don't really need a smartass right now."

"Well, I sure am sorry, boss, but I haven't got much else left to give to this waste of time fucking pretend intervention conversation. You got Oprah in the wings, or something? This isn't you. You don't even have the first idea what you did wrong, do you? You're trying to pay your dues so I'll just bounce back and everything will be like it was. Well shit, Jethro, it's not like it was. You left. I was going to let it all go, the bullshit and the betrayal, the abdication itself; in the interest of this team I was going to let it go. Maybe I let some bitter slide through, my bad, I'm not perfect like you. I'm not some stoic automaton who can turn it on and turn it off at-"

Gibbs scoffed out loud, shaking his head, "You listening to yourself, DiNozzo? _You can't turn it on and off_? That's what you _do_! That's what you're about, you're a walking headgame! The whole reason you even have this job is you're a blank goddamn slate. You don't exist, nothing touches you. You are the definition of a stoic automaton. The fact that nobody knows it is the best proof going, the fact that Kate- a professional profiler for God's sake- had no idea what she was dealing with or the things you're capable of... Well, I rest my damn case. How the hell do you expect anyone to know you, there's nothing to know! You're a job description and a bunch of baggage. You got me beat in the bitter and alone Olympics, kid. Beat by miles."

Tony took a swing. Obviously a terrible idea as Gibbs could almost definitely snap him like a twig, but it wasn't exactly his day for rational thought before action and the bald, unadulterated, long-feared _truth_ of that speech hurt him so badly it was a choice between the swing or the really damn unmanly option of bursting into tears.

Gibbs moved with the arc of the punch, kicked the coffee table out of the way, and used Tony's own momentum to turn him flush against him- back to chest- his arms locked around Tony's, his hands on his shoulders. He squeezed once, showing the force of the hold, and waited while Tony's breathing slowed down.

"I'm sorry."

There was crushing silence for a full minute. Tony stared at the carpet, not struggling. He wouldn't win anyway, Gibbs wasn't as strong as he used to be, but he also didn't fight fair. Tony had been taught Queensbury rules and boxing and fencing, but he hadn't been a marine and in the marines, they apparently emphasized dirty-but-effective over elegant and honourable. Also, there was the fact that he felt like a juvenile delinquent from some fifties movie, lashing out at the father-brother-authority figure and he didn't feel good about it. In fact, he was damned ashamed he'd come down to this level. He'd so wanted to maintain the moral high ground.

But. It seemed Gibbs had taken his fall from grace as a cue. A cue to what?

"What did you say?" he barely recognised his own voice.

Gibbs leaned even closer to his ear, his grip still tight, "I said I'm sorry, Tony. I'm sorry."

He went limp and slid out of the hold to face the son of a bitch. "You're sorry."

Gibbs' pale blue eyes were wide and haunted, that stupid moustache distractingly ugly over his rigidly set mouth, "I am."

"Man enough to show your weaknesses, now?" he flexed his arm where he'd been grabbed, "That's handy. What are you sorry for, exactly? I'd like to know."

That was a ready stance if he ever saw one, like Gibbs was expecting further violence at any moment. Well, he wasn't the judge of character he thought he was, if so, because Tony took years to work up enough simmering rage for the one punch he'd already thrown. The quality of his anger tended more towards a seething, icy contempt; that he got calm under duress was one of the few traits he saw in himself worthy of commendation.

"I'm not sorry I quit."

Tony laughed ferociously, "Calling a spade a spade, now, are we?"

The glare he received could have stripped paint and the curled fists were none too friendly, but Gibbs just maintained eye contact, still as a statue, "Maybe I shouldn't have done it like that, maybe I made it a lot harder on you than it had to be."

"Did Abby put you up to this?"

"Shut up before I shut you up."

He bit back a challenge, seeing real struggle on the old man's face. Usually when Gibbs' eyes got that round and his tone got this heavy, weighted with honesty and reluctance, they were both drunk or one of them was on a morphine drip.

"I'm sorry I came back like that. Putting you out of place. I know you-"

"Don't."

Okay, okay, okay. Okay. He was thinking maybe it was that Gibbs was a sociopath.

"Don't come to me playing up the wounded and vulnerable crap and remind me how much you know about my damage when you've just spent five years and three cases taking every kind of advantage of it you ever could. I am not an idiot, Gibbs, I-"

"Never said you were."

"You didn't have to!" Tony came into the other man's space the way Gibbs was always doing to him, feeling immense satisfaction in turning the tables and, especially, in his almost two inch height advantage. Usually he tried not to be taller than Gibbs- it felt wrong somehow- but right now, it was sweet as pie. "Why do you slap me down? I'm not talking about on the back of the head."

He sighed, "You remind me of me."

Tony felt weirdly empty about that, but he also thought he saw now what Ducky had been trying to tell him when he went to the doctor for succour all those weeks ago. "Yeah, there are some crucial differences."

"I know that, Tony."

Except for when he didn't.

Gibbs must have seen the disbelief in his eyes, "I do _now_."

Oh, honesty. The doubled-edged sword. And there was Gibbs admitting folly and weakness, to being wrong, and Tony recognised in that a more sincere attempt at restitution than anything else the other man could possibly have done. They were showing their hands, now.

"You ever forget to switch off, stop manipulating?" Tony asked. It was an offering, an olive branch, this thing that they _did_ have in common.

"I never switch off."

Well, wouldn't no one be surprised by that. Tony nodded, but he couldn't hide the pained extraction of his next words, "I did. When I was team leader, I did." _And I need you to see what that meant for me._

Gibbs' smile was sad and there was emotion in the man Tony did not recognise but which was not dissimilar to regret, "You'll be a better boss than me."

"I still want to learn from you, Gibbs. Jethro. Boss."

"And you will, as my partner. Anthony."

"Gonna pretend to respect me a bit in front of the team?"

"I always respected you."

"Right." Tony went to get them a couple beers, "As far as you're concerned, I'm irreplaceable."


End file.
